Can today's gaming laptop match desktop PC performance?

There can only be one winner in this CPU vs GPU battle, but once again we have to caution this is not a one-horse race. More often than not, a powerful GPU is much more important for playing games at their max settings with a decent frame rate to boot.

gaming laptops

Laptops still haven't caught up with desktops

That's not to say you can get away with any dainty processor paired with the most extreme graphics card. If you were to pop into a completely packed town in World of Warcraft on fully populated servers with such a rig your frame rate would go down drastically no matter how insane your GPU. This is because the computer needs to process where all the characters are and calculate the physics of every virtual body bumping into each other.

If you plan on building or making an SLI system such as the Aorus X7 Pro, a low-powered CPU can also become a bottleneck. On the other hand, going with lackluster graphics card will leave your gaming options limited to games with less resource intensive visuals or always setting your graphics options to low.

Mobile components still have a ways to go before they fully catch up with desktop parts. It's also evidently clear gamers can't skimp on either the CPU or GPU as neither can live on their own, but for the most part they'll want a nice fat graphics card to truly game.

Kevin Lee

Kevin Lee was a former computing reporter at TechRadar. Kevin is now the SEO Updates Editor at IGN based in New York. He handles all of the best of tech buying guides while also dipping his hand in the entertainment and games evergreen content. Kevin has over eight years of experience in the tech and games publications with previous bylines at Polygon, PC World, and more. Outside of work, Kevin is major movie buff of cult and bad films. He also regularly plays flight & space sim and racing games. IRL he's a fan of archery, axe throwing, and board games.