Nvidia’s GeForce RTX laptop graphics cards could be unleashed in January

Word on the GPU grapevine is that Nvidia will unleash its next-gen GeForce RTX graphics cards for laptops around CES time, meaning January 2019.

The mobile-targeted line-up will be headed up by the RTX 2080 Mobility along with a Max-Q spin on that GPU.

Then Nvidia will have the RTX 2070 Mobility, again with a Max-Q version, followed by the RTX 2060 Ti Mobility and vanilla RTX 2060 Mobility. At the lower-end will be the RTX 2050 Ti Mobility and again a vanilla RTX 2050.

All of these GPUs will apparently be released when January rolls around, as mentioned, except for the flagship RTX 2080 Mobility offerings which won’t come until a ‘bit later’.

Bear in mind that this is very much speculation, and comes courtesy of an unnamed source who spoke to Wccftech, so exercise some caution with these sort of rumors.

Gaming goodness

Still, those who enjoy gaming on a portable will doubtless be excited at the prospect of having a new RTX 2080 GPU before too long – even if this top-of-the-range model won’t be arriving to begin with, if all this is correct. It’s worth noting that previously, the rumor mongers expected this flagship graphics offering to be the first to launch (and possibly before the year was out, too).

It’s also interesting to note that according to this report, only the RTX 2080 and 2070 will be given the Max-Q treatment. Nvidia’s Max-Q technology involves optimizing the GPU in terms of its design and power-efficiency, meaning that laptop manufacturers can fit a powerful graphics solution into a relatively thin and light gaming notebook.

Finally, Wccftech also clarifies that the anonymous source didn’t explicitly name every one of these GPUs as being part of the RTX series, so there is a possibility that lower tier models could still be branded GTX cards rather than RTX.

So yes, this one is certainly rather up in the air, but if we are getting close to launch – or at least an unveiling from Nvidia – there will be more rumors along soon, no doubt, to help clarify the exact picture on the mobile GPU front.

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).