Nvidia's CES 2021 keynote has finally confirmed rumors that have been swirling for a while now, with Team Green announcing its mobile range of RTX 3000 graphics cards, bringing powerful Ampere technology to gaming laptops.
This is incredibly exciting, as it could mean upcoming gaming laptops could get a serious performance boost this year. After all, it's been two years since the RTX 2080 laptop GPU came out.
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With Ampere offering better ray tracing and DLSS support, allowing for better performance at ultra high resolutions with minimal impact to graphic fidelity, we'll now be seeing these improvements come to gaming laptops.
Next-gen gaming laptops
The new laptop GPUs are built on the Ampere architecture, with second generation RTX and third generation Max-Q technology, which, Nvidia promises offers twice the power efficiency of previous generations.
Being able to offer high performance in thin and light laptop designs, thanks to Max-Q, without overheating, is a tricky balance, and Nvidia states that thanks to AI, it will be able to better manage power and heat.
Dynamic Boost 2.0 will shift power between CPU, GPU and memory via AI on a per frame basis, for even better power optimization and performance gains.
There's also Whisper Mode 2.0 which will give users control over the acoustics of their laptop's cooling, and is added to laptops at a design-level. Hopefully this means laptops can keep cool without excessive fan noise.
The new laptop GPUs Nvidia announced are:
- RTX 3060 mobile: 1.3x faster than PS5. 90fps 1080p gaming in laptops starting at $999. Faster than the RTX 2080 Super as well.
- RTX 3070 mobile: 1.5x than RTX 2070. 90fps in the latest games at 1440p, and in laptops beginning at $1,299.
- RTX 3080 mobile: World's fastest laptop GPU with 16GB GDDR6 memory. Will achieve over 100fps at Ultra settings at 1440p. Laptops with this GPU start at $1,999.
We expect gaming laptops with the new RTX 3000 series mobile graphics cards to show up during CES 2021 as well, and hopefully we'll get a chance to test them out to see just how big of a leap these new mobile GPUs are.
- Check out all of TechRadar's CES 2021 coverage. We're remotely covering the online-only show to bring you all the breaking tech news and launches, plus a smattering of hands-on reviews.
