Turn a Laptop With Thunderbolt Into a Hot Gaming Rig!
The relatively new Thunderbolt external interconnect is characterized by having very high data throughput (20 Gbit/s) and has been designed to deliver full speed video and 3D graphics by supporting the PCI Express and DisplayPort v1.1a protocols. This allows a laptop featuring a reasonably fast CPU along with a Thunderbolt port, to actually be turned be turned into a hotrod gaming rig! Simply connect an external high performance graphics card via Thunderbolt and that’s it, instant high powered graphics.
A prototype external graphics card from Lucid Logic, makers of the Virtu MVP graphics acceleration software, was shown off at IDF, which transformed the graphics performance of the demo laptop. Running 3DMark06 on the laptop’s HD 4000 graphics benchmarked at a mediocre 28 frame per second. However, on plugging in the external graphics card (no reboot required) the score jumped to around 89fps – a massive improvement able to deliver silky-smooth gameplay. The prototype external graphics card used the AMD Radeon HD 6700 GPU. Lucid says that this technology is even compatible with SLI or CrossFireX. External graphics solutions have been tried before, but a proper interface to really allow for a proper implementation wasn’t there, hence the products failed. Alas, this product is still under development with no firm release date yet.
Right now, however, Lucid’s external Thunderbolt graphics technology is still under development with no set release date and no official partners on board. However, todays notebook buyers can take heart as the company says that graphics peripherals based on its technology should be compatible with current-generation Ultrabooks that have Thunderbolt on board.
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