If you’ve been following tech news starting today, pretty sure you’ve caught wind of the latest gaming laptops from various brands that are pretty much 4K ready from the start because the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series Laptop GPU has been announced.
Thanks to the superior innovation brought forward by the Ada Lovelace architecture, this is the first time we see a 90-class GPU finally getting its place inside the compact chassis of gaming laptops so as long as you have the money to spend, you can practically get gaming experience far better than most desktop users while staying portable. The RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 Laptop GPU are said to be strong enough to support 4K60FPS from the get-go on top of livestreaming the footage to fellow viewers with AV1 encoding on supporting platforms (currently Discord only). Machines armed with one of these cards will start from USD1,999 and start selling beginning February 8.
On the other hand, the RTX 4070, RTX 4060, and RTX 4050 strive for a high ratio of performance-per-watt figure since they are far stronger than the last gen offerings while consuming less power as low as one-third of their predecessors. According to the announcement, at least NVIDIA is eyeing for a 1440p80FPS target so one can enjoy high-resolution gaming without depending on the power brick as often.
Here’s a simple table for spec checking against the 5 Laptop GPU models.
Accompanying the debut of the RTX 40 series Laptop GPU are the 5th generation Max-Q technologies that take efficiency optimization to a higher level thanks to the use of low-voltage GDDR6 VRAM, having DLSS 3 baked directly into the suite and tri-speed memory control to switch between different voltage state at super-fast response rate. All of these come together to enhance battery life to as much as 3 times longer than in unoptimized states.
For the desktop gang, the early death of the supposed “RTX 4080 12GB” has been reborn as the RTX 4070 Ti with most people expecting this to happen sooner or later. Available starting tomorrow, the card will start from USD799 which is 100 dollars cheaper if it continues to bear the “4080” name tag. The core selling point here is it uses half as much power as the last gen king-of-the-hill RTX 3090 Ti while achieving slightly higher performance than it in most cases, making it the most sensible choice in both high FPS 1440p or stable 60+FPS in 4K gaming.
This is contributed by the fact that RTX 40 series cards are able to utilize DLSS 3 to acquire a lot more performance especially when you flick the RTX ON switch. With more games adopting the latest AI tech revision into the game engine, the RTX 4070 Ti seems to be a clear choice here if we bar out the “not-so-USD799” price tag offered by AIBs.
However, if you have the budget to get it, it is recommended to buy the latest generation of offerings so that you can enjoy all the RTX features without getting hardware-capped.
