Leaked Nvidia RTX 4090 will make the best gaming laptops even better
Nvidia’s next-gen mobile GPUs have finally leaked
➡️The Shortcut Skinny: Faster gaming laptops
💦 RTX 4000 GPU specs have leaked
⚡ RTX 4090 mobile rumored to use up to 200W of power
🤔 Will these GPUs be at CES 2023?
Now that the Nvidia RTX 4090 – and to a lesser extent the RTX 4080 – it’s time to start thinking about what the best GPUs will look like in the next generation of gaming laptops. Luckily, the leaks are suggesting an exciting CES 2023.
A fresh specs leak spotted by Wccftech has spoiled the whole range of Nvidia Ada Lovelace mobile graphics cards, ranging from a low-end RTX 4050 to the RTX 4090 at the high end. Notably, there wasn’t an RTX 3090 mobile GPU, even in the best laptops. But, if you want to take advantage of the RTX 4090 in your next mobile gaming PC or workstation, you’re going to need to carry around a huge power cable.
That’s because this leak suggests the flagship GPU will be specced at a jaw-dropping 200W TGP (total graphics power), which is what many desktop GPUs require. However, it also indicates that the top-end RTX 4090 will be based on the AD103 GPU, which is what the RTX 4080 is based on.
“What is a graphics card?”, you ask. I have you covered.
If these specs are accurate, that means the most powerful gaming laptop on the market will be quite a ways behind what the RTX 4080 can achieve on desktop – as that graphics card has a power budget of 320W. And, simply put, the more electricity you can shove into a graphics card, the higher the frame rate will be.
At the end of the day, though, we won’t know whether or not these leaks are accurate until Nvidia lifts the veil on its next lineup of gaming laptop parts. But with CES 2023 around the corner, I suspect that will happen sooner rather than later.
Why should I care?
While it’s a given that new laptop graphics chips are going to follow shortly after their desktop counterparts, this generation of Nvidia graphics cards is a huge deal for gaming laptops.
If these GPUs are like their desktop equivalents, they’ll come with support for DLSS (Deep Learning Super-Sampling) 3.0, and more importantly Nvidia’s new AI Frame Generation tech. This basically takes a huge load off of the CPU, and uses a machine learning algorithm to generate frames when otherwise the GPU would be sitting and waiting for the slower chip.
This is a huge deal for laptops, as even the best processors for mobile PCs lag far behind their desktop counterparts. This will make open-world games like Assassin’s Creed or Cyberpunk 2077 see much-improved performance, especially on laptops with high refresh rate displays.
That being said, I don’t really recommend enabling DLSS frame generation in a game where you’re not already getting 60 fps. It’s a technology that’s more meant for reaching high frame rates above 100 fps. It’s for esports, basically.
Either way, the next generation of gaming laptops is almost here, and I hope these leaks are accurate. I can’t wait to put these chips through their paces in my lab.