At CES 2021, Nvidia announced its new RTX 30-series mobile graphics cards, and boasted about some impressive gains over the competition. Its biggest claims? The RTX 3060 is allegedly 30% faster than the PlayStation 5. While that might not make people choose a gaming laptop over a console, it’s still impressive considering the RTX 3060 is the lowest-powered GPU in the stack.
Nvidia also noted that the RTX 3060 was faster than the flagship from Nvidia’s previous generation, the RTX 2080 Super. What kind of gaming performance can we expect from these new RTX 3060 laptops? It’s a pretty general statement, but Nvidia says they can play at 90 frames per second (fps) at 1080p on Ultra graphics.
RTX 3060-powered laptops will start at $999. A number of laptops at CES 2021 have already been announced, including the Acer Predator Triton 300 SE, which is paired with the new H-series 35-watt Intel processors.
Alongside the mobile version, Nvidia also announced the desktop counterpart to the RTX 3060. Just a month ago, Nvidia launched the RTX 3060 Ti, which costs $399. This $329 RTX 3060 fleshes out the budget-level offerings from the 3000-series.
Nvidia also announced the mobile versions of the RTX 3070 and 3080, which push gaming laptops toward higher resolutions and refresh rates for the first time. Nvidia says it’s been working behind the scenes for years to get 1440p panels into gaming laptops, and they’ll now be widely available. Companies like Razer, Lenovo, and Asus have already announced new laptops that support this resolution, with up to 240Hz refresh rates.
Nvidia says the RTX 3070 is 1.5 times faster than the RTX 2070 and can play games at 90 fps at 1440p at Ultra settings. These laptops start at $1,299.
Lastly, there’s the flagship RTX 3080. Nvidia says it deliverx 100 fps in games with “RTX On” in 1440p at Ultra settings. This GPU features 16GB of GDDR4 memory, and will be included in laptops starting at $1,999.
Although Nvidia didn’t mention gaming in 4K, some manufacturers have already started launching 4K gaming laptops with the RTX 3080 and refresh rates up to 120Hz.
All the new RTX 30-series mobile GPUs are based on 2nd-generation RTX architecture, including the upgraded Tensor cores and RT cores. They also include the latest Nvidia features, such as Dynamic Boost, DLSS 2.0, and hardware-accelerated RTX ray tracing.