Nvidia RTX 4050 laptop GPU leak suggests it might be here sooner than you think

Alienware M15 R7 gaming laptop
(Image credit: Future)

Nvidia’s RTX 4050 laptop graphics card is apparently inbound, or at least what appears to be the mobile GPU has been unearthed on Twitter.

As Tom’s Hardware spotted, the RTX 4050 was sighted in benchmarks as posted by Benchleaks on Twitter.

The PugetBench results are for a Samsung Galaxy Book Pro laptop which is listed as running an Intel Core i7-13700H CPU alongside an RTX 4050 notebook GPU (plus 16GB of system RAM).

As ever, we shouldn’t get carried away with any online leaks, so proceed with a suitably cautious head on skeptical shoulders – but this is still an exciting potential glimpse of what could be a more affordable Lovelace laptop GPU.

What result does the RTX 4050 laptop GPU achieve? That’d be an overall score of 1,124 with 57.4 GPU points in PugetBench with Premiere Pro 22.6.2, and that compares to 1,009 points and 48.9 GPU points for a Dell XPS 15 model with a Core i7-12700H processor and RTX 3050 laptop graphics card.


Analysis: RTX 4050 goodness is just around the corner?

Performance-wise, then, we’re looking at a theoretical 18% (or so) faster RTX 4050 GPU compared to the RTX 3050, but of course, apply heavy seasoning to any leaked benchmark, and remember that the RTX 4050 is likely to (well, it will) perform better than this when the graphics card is actually out there in laptops (with release drivers).

While trying to draw conclusions on speed is a tentative business at this point, what’s really interesting here is that the RTX 4050 has appeared at all. Thus far, we’ve only seen the heavy hitters from Nvidia’s next-gen Lovelace range – and desktop cards at that – but now all of a sudden yesterday we witnessed a juicy RTX 4060 leak, and now the RTX 4050 has pitched up.

Now, by all accounts, the desktop RTX 4060 is still a long way off – likely over half a year – but with this actual sighting of the RTX 4050 (assuming it’s genuine) inside a test laptop, we can hope that this particular Lovelace GPU is not too far off coming out.

Indeed, we might keep our fingers crossed that this is a sign Nvidia is poised to reveal the RTX 4050, and maybe other next-gen laptop GPUs, at CES 2023 in January. After all, the theory is that we’ll see Intel Raptor Lake mobile processors very soon, and being twinned with RTX 40 Series laptop GPUs will make for some seriously potent gaming laptops – these are definitely future models to watch, as we’ve pointed out before.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).