Nvidia’s next-generation laptop GPUs leap to 1440p displays

If you’re wondering when gaming laptops would start a more serious push towards 1440p panels, this week’s CES reveal from Nvidia is aimed directly at you. Here it is: a generational leap in the company’s GPUs, designed for laptops, this time with the Ampere architecture and RTX 3000 branding.

Three GPU models have been announced in all, and they are named after the GeForce RTX 3080, 3070 and 3060. They are expected to be rolled out in the “70+” laptop models from January 26. Nvidia has listed “top OEMs” like Acer, Alienware, ASUS, Gigabyte, HP, Lenovo, MSI and Razer with upcoming RTX 3000 series notebooks, as well as “local OEMs and system builders”.

Verification of the naming convention

Nvidia’s selling point positions the RTX 3060 laptop variant as “faster than laptops equipped with the RTX 2080 Super,” although this model may land more specifically in 1080p systems. Both top-of-the-line models are often seen as part of 1440p systems, a resolution that has long been left in the cold of the gaming laptop (and which will no doubt benefit immensely from the DLSS scaling solution. owner of Nvidia). While Nvidia’s latest promotional material mentions a cost-effective upgrade over the latest generation of laptop GPUs, we’re still waiting to see OEMs roll out specific pricing and specs for their late January models. (Also, we wonder if these laptops will sell out too quickly for average humans to get them.)

Nvidia continues its naming convention of borrowing desktop model numbers for its smaller laptop variants, and in some ways it holds true. The move from the laptop side to the RTX 3000 series comes with the inclusion of second generation ray tracing cores and third generation tensor cores, which have been proven on the RTX 3000 desktop models that they offer. performance upgrades outside of pure rasterization, while reducing space requirements on physical hardware.

But if you put the desktop and laptop specs side by side, the downgrades for each vary a bit more than you might expect from the names alone. The RTX 3080, in particular, sees an almost 30% drop in CUDA cores, compared to 13% for the RTX 3070. (Oddly, the RTX 3060 laptop variant will have 6.6% more CUDA cores than its desktop variant, but 21.1% less than the 3060 Ti desktop.)

Honestly, the laptop version of the RTX 3080 probably deserves a different name, as it also upgrades to a 256-bit memory bus and GDDR6 VRAM (instead of the very hot GDDR6X variant found in the desktop model, which is attached to a 320-bit bus). Not that these upgrades aren’t necessary to operate under the thermal and electrical constraints of a laptop chassis; we’re just saying. Speaking of which, the clock speeds of the RTX 3000 series of laptops vary across the board as well, and the ranges announced by Nvidia will certainly vary more once they’re out in the wild and packaged in a variety of. OEM chassis.

And in a surprising turn, this RTX 3080, despite a VRAM power reduction, gets an optional capability improve up to 16 GB of GDDR6. It’s not quite the RTX 3080 Ti (which could hold up to 20GB of GDDR6X VRAM), but if you’re looking for some serious VRAM in a studio-grade laptop in 2021, you might want to smash a few. additional piggy banks. before January 26.

Define ‘whisper’, Nvidia

The rest of this week’s announcement mentions a few efficiency gains that may prove difficult to test, as their improvements revolve around claims such as “power balancing … on a per frame basis” and “access to all VRAM GPUs simultaneously ”. (The latter, called Resizable BAR, won’t be ready at launch and will require a driver update.) There is also the “WhisperMode 2.0” issue, which will apparently allow users to choose the fan noise level from their choice and see the system performance adjusted accordingly. It remains to be seen exactly how the performance will go from “hearing me think” to “standing in an airport hangar”.

We can’t wait to work with these GPUs to see exactly how these promises play out, and from the look of things, Nvidia will again solidly beat AMD in the market in any given generation, with Team Red only offering as a “first half of 2020” wave for its RDNA2 portable GPU line.

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