Nvidia has been losing some ground to its rival AMD, with the competitor having a full lineup of powerful and DX11 ready mobile GPUs on the market for quite a while now. Just in time for the IFA trade show in Berlin, Nvidia is aiming to catch up – and possibly take over the lead – with an announcement of a major expansion of its mobile GPU lineup.

It is of course the long-awaited GeForce 400M “Fermi” series of DX11 compatible graphics cards, of which only the high-end GTX 480M has been available so far. The full series adds the more affordable high-end models GeForce GTX 470M and 460M, as well as the mid-range GeForce GT 445M, 435M, 425M, 420M and the lower-end 415M.

The new laptop graphics cards all feature the now familiar Optimus technology for seamless switching between the Intel IGP and the dedicated card and 3D Vision support. Acer, Asus, Dell, Lenovo, Samsung and Toshiba have already announced their first models (more on this later on).

To use the Stereoscopic 3D technology you will still need 3D Vision goggles from NVIDIA and, more importantly, a 3D-capable 120Hz display. However, you can also connect your laptop to a 3DTV and use it to watch 3D movies.

Nvidia has dubbed the (not entirely) new set of features “Graphics Plus,” which includes the following:

* Support for NVIDIA 3D Vision
* PhysX support for realistic physics effects
* Support for CUDA GPGPU computing
* NVIDIA Verde Notebook Drivers for improving system stability and performance
* 3DTV-play software for connecting 3D vision-based laptops and desktop PCs to a 3D TV.

I’m not sure why I insist on torturing my computers with all these benchmarks, but if it’s any consolation it seems like a common affliction among hardware geeks. Running Unigine Heaven on my lowly 9600M-equipped laptop wasn’t exactly an encouraging experience, but here’s a new version anyhow.Unigine has taken the opportunity to launch version 2.0 of its performance test Heaven ahead of Nvidia’s Fermi launch. Since AMD/ATI has been on the market for month with DirectX 11 cards it’s about time that Nvidia releases its first cards.

Heaven puts real pressure on the GPU, and even if it’s compatible with DX 9, 10 and OpenGL, DX11 is of course where the new and potentially interesting features are. Unfortunately these cards are still a rare commodity – especially in laptops.

In version 2, Unigine developers have implemented heavier tessellation, more advanced physics, dynamic lighting and some other general improvements. New is also that you can choose three levels of extreme GPU torture: Moderate, normal or extreme.

To find out how far behind your current graphics card is, you can download Heaven 2.0 right away from Unigine. It’s also available for Linux. Here’s how it’s supposed to look:

It looks like the first benchmark for DirectX 11 has arrived. Unigine Corp. has released demo/benchmark tool called Heaven that runs in all Direct X 9, 10 and 11 modes. Unfortunately, to be able to see the new and improved DX11 features you’ll need a compatible video card, and there aren’t many of those around yet.

If you want to see the demo for yourself, it’s free to download from the official website. It can be used to fly around a smallish but nicely rendered virtual world with floating islands, windmills and a village with its very own dragon statue.  It displays the current frame rate and has benchmarking functionality. We’ve tried it and it looks pretty neat, although with the Nvidia card we used, the difference between DX10 vs. DX11 wasn’t noticeable. ATI users may have better luck, as the demo supports ATI’s Eyefinity technology.

One of the most interesting parts of DX11 in terms of visual improvements is a technology called tessellation. Unigine’s press release sells the feature better than i do:

The distinguishing feature of the benchmark is a hardware tessellation that is a scalable technology aimed for automatic subdivision of polygons into smaller and finer pieces, so that developers can gain a more detailed look of their games almost free of charge in terms of performance. Thanks to this procedure, the elaboration of the rendered image finally approaches the boundary of veridical visual perception: the virtual reality transcends conjured by your hand.

Here’s what it looks like with the new features turned on (although the quality hardly does it justice):

To run the demo you need at least an ATI Radeon 2xxx series/Nvidia GeForce 7xxx series GPU. If you also want it to look good, however, a 4800/8800 series or better card is recommended.