We were pleasantly surprised to find that the price was not as high as we had feared.
As anticipated, Nvidia debuted its GeForce RTX 40 Series laptop GPUs at CES 2023. These GPUs will be available on February 8 from the world’s leading laptop manufacturers, including Acer, Alienware, Asus, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, Lenovo, MSI, Razer, and Samsung.
The Ada Lovelace architecture is utilized by Nvidia to provide the “largest-ever generational leap in performance and power efficiency.” The company boasts that these GPUs are now up to twice as fast as a PlayStation 5, despite being one-sixth as large. Next month, we can’t wait to put this to the test, but for now,vidi let’s take a look at what Nvidia said about its new GPUs.
What laptops from the RTX 40 Series have been announced?
This article focuses on the GPUs in particular, but the major companies have been busy announcing a plethora of laptops that will feature this technology alongside 13th Gen Intel CPUs. Visit our list of the best gaming laptops at CES 2023 for more information. To get down to brass tacks, we’ve covered them all below:
- Acer Predator laptops
- Acer Nitro laptops
- Asus ROG Zephyrus M16
- Asus ROG Flow X13
- Alienware x16, x14, m16 and m18
- Dell G15 and G16
How strong are they?
Nvidia has been careful to provide specific scenarios to illustrate the power of these new GPUs, such as the comparison to the PS5. But if you read between the lines, you can see that this situation has a great deal of performance potential.
The RTX 40 Series GPUs for laptops are capable of delivering up to four times the performance of the RTX 30 Series, and the new RT Overdrive mode significantly improves ray tracing performance.
The flagship RTX 4090 and 4080 laptops are capable of outputting gameplay to three 4K monitors at 60 FPS (an impressive feat for driving sim enthusiasts such as me) and live streaming gameplay at full 4K 60 with AV1 encoding to Discord. In addition, the architecture’s new dual encoders have halved the video export time for creators.
RTX 4050, 4060, and 4070 laptops are capable of delivering 80 FPS gameplay at 1440p ultra while reducing Blender scene rendering times from two and a half hours to just ten minutes if your budget doesn’t stretch to the top tier.
How power-effective are they?
It’s not enough for a laptop GPU to be powerful; it must also be energy-efficient. With its fifth-generation Max-Q technology, Nvidia has also accomplished this.
These GPUs now feature the lowest voltage GDDR6 memory ever shipped, a tri-speed memory control for improved power management, and full support for its DLSS 3 supersampling, which can effectively double the battery life. In addition, the on-chip memory bandwidth has been doubled at the architectural level, which significantly improves clock gating.
In practical terms, this means that content creators can subject these laptops to their demanding workflows while the GPU still consumes minimal power, resulting in up to three times the battery life.
Are they worth the money?
This is the section I feared the most, but my fears were somewhat unfounded. The flagship RTX 4090 and 4080 laptops will be available starting at $1,999 on February 8. Meanwhile, the other RTX 4070, 4060, and 4050 laptops will be available beginning at $999 on February 22.
After the exorbitant price of the desktop 4090, this is an unexpectedly welcome resistance to inflation-based price increases.
Outlook
You may have read my article from the end of last year about why you shouldn’t wait for the RTX 40 Series laptops and should instead purchase a model from the previous generation. Even though I stand by that statement (and the savings will only get better now that the cat is officially out of the bag), if these claims are to be believed, the power difference this time around is astounding.
They have the potential to be true game-changers due to their adaptability and power efficiency (pardon the pun). But I won’t be able to say for certain until I conduct hands-on testing.
