NVIDIA's RTX GPUs bring ray tracing to laptops
It'll make notebook gaming look a lot more realistic.
It didn't take NVIDIA long to shrink down its groundbreaking RTX 20-series graphics processors for gaming notebooks. At CES, the company announced that RTX GPUs are coming to 40 upcoming laptops, with availability starting on January 29th. That includes every major OEM like ASUS, Alienware and HP. Much like the portable GTX 10-series GPUs, NVIDIA aims to deliver most of the features of the RTX desktop cards -- including real-time ray tracing -- with less of a power drain. 17 of those upcoming RTX notebooks will feature Max-Q designs, which aren't as fast as their desktop counterparts, but can squeeze into tight notebook frames.
During his CES keynote, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang held up a new version of MSI's GS65 Stealth Thin with an RTX 2080 GPU. Power-wise, it's over twice as fast as a PlayStation 4 Pro and it even outmatches the desktop GTX 1080 GPU. Even the lower end RTX 2060 for mobile is still plenty powerful, with 1.6x faster performance than the PS4 Pro. And yes, there's an RTX 2070 headed to laptops too. Huang also says RTX notebooks will be available with 1080p and 4K screens, hopefully with high refresh rates.
