Just bought a new gaming notebook? Now that’s a shame, as your tech is now old. Nvidia has announced that it is bringing its GTX 10 series of cards to gaming notebooks… pretty much everywhere. These Pascal cards aren’t mobile-specific options either, Nvidia are bringing their GeForce GTX 1080, the GTX 1070 (which takes the place of the GTX980 M) and the GTX 1060 (which will take over from the GTX970 M) to notebooks. Might as well be on the desktop, though, given the substantial performance boost they’re conferring over Nvidia’s last generation of portable graphics hardware.

Besides being desktop graphics cards in, you know, portable frames, Nvidia’s new 10-series Pascal-architectured babies have something else going for them. They’re VR-ready, according to the company, and we’ve got no problem believing that of the GTX 1080, what with its 2,560 CUDA cores and 1,733MHz clock speed (8GB GDDR5). The slowest of the bunch, the GTX 1060, sports just 1,280 CUDA cores and a clock speed of 1,670MHz (6GB GDDR5), and might battle a little to uphold Nvidia’s claim but the upshot is that the upcoming crop of gaming notebooks are just about all going to be up to the rigours of rendering VR. Time to order that HTC Vive.

Nvidia said that “Acer, Aorus, ASUS, Clevo, EVGA, Gigabyte, HP, Lenovo, MSI and Razer all announced one or more notebooks with these GPUs today” and we can say that we’re surprised by that…

That’s because we’ve already got our hands on one of the first of these notebooks to arrive in South Africa, the MSI GT72VR Dominator Pro. The GT72VR packs an Intel Core i7-6700 HQ, 16GB of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 8GB (GDDR5), and 1TB of storage — as well as a 256GB SSD boot drive. We’ll be taking it, and its Tobii-enabled chassis, for a test-drive later this week. Watch this space.