It’s something we’ve all expected since Nvidia first announced the RTX 20-series of GPUs last year. Super fast ray tracing graphics cards in a laptop. And finally, after months of waiting, Nvidia announced the new series of GPUs at CES.
Based on the Turing architecture, these GPUs are the smaller cousins to the GPUs that started shipping for desktops last fall. In our tests, the desktop version of the RTX 2080 was almost twice as fast as the GTX 1080 when rendering many games in 4K. The same kind of performance increase should be seen in the mobile version as well.
It will, at the very least, promise 60 frames per second in resource hogging AAA games like Battlefield V, and CEO Jensen Huang claimed the mobile 2080 is twice as fast as a Sony PS4.
But the big advance is ray tracing, which is technology that allows light in digital environments (like video games) behave more naturally, making shadows and light reflecting off surfaces behave just like they would in real life.
Three different RTX GPUs will initially be available for laptops, the 2060, with 6GB of GDDR6 RAM, and the 2070 and 2080, both with 8GB of GDDR6 RAM.
A whole slew of laptop makers are expected to start shipping laptops with these GPUs in the coming months. That includes Acer, Gigabyte, MSI, and nearly every single other computer maker in the world (think Razer, Dell, Lenovo, and Asus). The first laptops will start shipping January 29.