As expected when the GeForce RTX 50 Series desktops were announced, the mobile versions of these graphics cards for laptops are finally arriving on the market. More precisely, these are the products integrating a mobile RTX 5090 or a mobile RTX 5080 that are now officially present on the virtual shelves of retailers. The gaming laptops equipped with a mobile RTX 5070 Ti are still up for pre-order and should not be available until the second half of April. The offer of laptops incorporating a mobile RTX 5070 is, however, still non-existent; You'll probably have to wait until early May to get your hands on one of these products.
In practice, few models are currently actually available on the market, especially at the minimum prices communicated by Nvidia, but the offer should expand over time. For the most impatient, the most affordable gaming laptop of this new generation seems to be the MSI Vector 16 HX AI (A2XWIG): equipped with a mobile RTX 5080 and a Core Ultra 9 275HX, it is listed at 2800 euros for a few days, before returning to its "normal" price of more than 3000 euros. As for models integrating a mobile RTX 5070 Ti, we also prefer the MSI Vector 16 HX AI: the A2XWHG version equipped with this GPU and a Core Ultra 7 255HX is currently available for pre-order at 2500 euros.
Nvidia now requires manufacturers to detail consumption
The launch of this new range of mobile GPUs is also an opportunity for Nvidia to take steps to correct a source of frustration for buyers of laptop gaming, by now requiring manufacturers to explicitly display detailed specifications of the graphics part in terms of energy consumption (i.e. the Total Graphics Power, or TGP). This initiative aims to eliminate ambiguity surrounding power settings and limits, an issue that has sometimes misled consumers by preventing fair comparisons of the potential performance of different laptop models equipped with the same GPU.
| GeForce Mobile RTX 5090 | GeForce Mobile RTX 5080 | GeForce Mobile RTX 5070 Ti | GeForce Mobile RTX 5070 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Graphics Chipset | GB203 | GB203 | GB205 | GB206 |
| Cores CUDA | 10496 | 7680 | 5888 | 4608 |
| Tensor Cores (AI) | 5th generation 1824 AI TOPS | 5th generation 1334 AI Tops GDDR7 | ||
| Memory interface | 256-bit | 256-bit | 192-bit | 128-bit |
| Video encoder (NVENC) | 3x 9th generation | 2x 9th generation | 1x 9th generation | 1x 9th generation |
| Video decoder (NVDEC) | 2x 6th generation | 2x 6th generation | 1x 6th generation | 1x 6th generation |
| Power Consumption | 95-150W | 80-150W | 60-115W | 50-100W |
A handful of laptop manufacturers, however, don't seem to be fully on board yet; for example, Razer and its 2015 Blade 16, GPU power consumption isn't listed in the technical specifications but is hidden in the middle of the product description. NVIDIA has responded to these concerns, however, stating that it is actively working with laptop manufacturers to ensure they clearly state the power limit on their websites.
Increased performance, but drivers not yet perfected
Now available, the first independent benchmarks of the performance offered by these GeForce RTX 50 Series gaming laptops, primarily the high-end models featuring a mobile GeForce RTX 5090, have begun to emerge.
Unsurprisingly (if anything, it would have been worrisome), the initial results suggest a performance improvement over the previous generation RTX 40, although the magnitude of this gain can vary depending on the exact laptop models, their thermal design, and the games tested. In a best-case scenario, the mobile RTX 5090 thus shows a gain of around 10 to 20% over the mobile RTX 4090. Comparing this mobile GPU to the desktop RTX 5090 also reveals a significant gap, with performance roughly half that of the RTX 5090, largely due to differences in core count, lower operating frequencies, and significantly lower power consumption.
However, issues with instability and game crashes (particularly in Red Dead Redemption 2 and Borderlands 3) have been regularly noted, suggesting that the graphics drivers for this new generation are not yet fully optimized. Nvidia has acknowledged the existence of some of these issues and has indicated that it is actively working to resolve them through driver updates.
The mobile RTX 5060 and 5050 are already on the horizon
After these mobile RTX 5090, 5080, 5070 Ti and 5070, attention is now turning to the upcoming arrival of more affordable GPUs: the mobile RTX 5060 and RTX 5050. These chips should make Blackwell architecture more accessible and equip a new wave of mid-range gaming laptops capable of comfortably running recent games in Full HD.
No specific release date has been announced yet, but it is likely that these models will appear in the coming months, following Nvidia's usual launch schedule for mobile GPUs. Acer has more or less already confirmed – via its Hong Kong site, the page has since been deleted – that a first laptop model equipped with a mobile RTX 5060 will appear in its catalog at the beginning of May, while an MSI model equipped with a mobile RTX 5050 with 8 GB of GDDR7 memory has been spotted online at the French retailer PC21.
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