Nvidia RTX 40 Series laptops are launching February — and they're twice as fast as a PS5

(Image credit: NVIDIA)

As expected, Nvidia has launched its GeForce RTX 40 Series laptop GPUs at CES 2023 — available starting February 8 from the world’s top manufacturers, including Acer, Alienware, Asus, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, Lenovo, MSI, Razer, and Samsung.

Nvidia uses the Ada Lovelace architecture to deliver the “largest-ever generational leap in performance and power efficiency.” In fact, the company has made a huge claim, boasting that these GPUs are now up to twice as fast as a PlayStation 5, while being just one-sixth the size. We can't wait to put that to the test next month, but for now,vidi let's take a look at what Nvidia had to say about its new GPUs.

What RTX 40 Series laptops have been announced?

Of course, this piece is all about the GPUs specifically, but the big companies have been busy announcing a ton of laptops that will be packing this tech, alongside the 13th Gen Intel CPUs. For more, check out our best gaming laptops of CES 2023 list. To get into the nitty gritty, we’ve covered them all just below:

How powerful are they?

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 — (Image credit: Asus)

Nvidia has been careful in giving us certain scenarios as examples of how powerful these new GPUs are, such as the aforementioned comparison to a PS5. But read between the lines, and you can see there’s a lot of performance potential here.

The RTX 40 Series laptop GPUs are capable of delivering up to four times greater performance than RTX 30 Series, with a vast increase in ray tracing capability thanks to the new RT Overdrive mode.

Looking a little closer, the flagship RTX 4090 and 4080 laptops are capable of outputting gameplay to three 4K monitors at 60 FPS (an impressive feat for driving sim lovers like me), and livestream gameplay at a full 4K 60 with AV1 encoding to Discord. Plus, for creators, thanks to the new dual encoders in the architecture, video export time has been cut in half.

If your budget doesn’t stretch to the top tier, that’s where the RTX 4050, 4060, and 4070 laptops come in, which are capable of delivering 80 FPS gameplay at 1440p ultra, while cutting scene rendering times in Blender from two and a half hours to just ten minutes.

How power efficient are they?

Acer Nitro 17 2023 — (Image credit: Acer)

Being beasty is only half of the mission of any laptop GPU — you also have to do this while being power efficient. Nvidia has delivered on this too with its fifth generation Max-Q tech technology.

These GPUs now have the lowest voltage GDDR6 memory ever shipped, a tri-speed memory control for a better balance of power management, and it fully supports its DLSS 3 supersampling, which is capable of effectively doubling the battery life. Plus, the on-chip memory bandwidth has been doubled at an architecture level, which improves clock gating significantly.

In real world terms, this means content creators can hammer these laptops with their demanding workflows while the GPU still only sips the battery, resulting in up to three times the longevity.

Are they worth the money?

This is the part I feared the most, but those fears were slightly misplaced. Flagship RTX 4090 and 4080 laptops start at $1,999 and will launch on February 8. Meanwhile, the other RTX 4070, 4060, and 4050 laptops will launch on February 22 starting as low as $999.

After the huge price tag of the desktop 4090, this is a surprisingly welcome resilience to any inflation-based price jumps.

Outlook

You may have read my piece towards the end of last year about why you shouldn’t wait for the RTX 40 Series laptops and pick up a good deal on previous generation models. While I do stand by that (and the savings are only going to get better now the cat is officially out the bag), if these claims are to be believed, the power difference is pretty staggering this time round.

With the versatility to be pushed with blistering game performance, along with plenty of optimization to maintain peak power efficiency, they have the potential to be real game changers (pardon the pun). But I wouldn’t like to say for sure until going hands-on with some proper testing.

Jason brought a decade of tech and gaming journalism experience to his role as a writer at Laptop Mag, and he is now the Managing Editor of Computing at Tom's Guide. He takes a particular interest in writing articles and creating videos about laptops, headphones and games. He has previously written for Kotaku, Stuff and BBC Science Focus. In his spare time, you'll find Jason looking for good dogs to pet or thinking about eating pizza if he isn't already.