Nvidia promises RTX 4090 performance in a $1,300 laptop

By Monica J. White Published January 6, 2025

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang just unveiled the RTX 50-series, including both desktop cards like the beastly RTX 5090 and laptop variants. As far as laptop gamers go, there’s a lot to get hyped for here, as these GPUs might end up being some of the best graphics cards in terms of performance. Huang promises to deliver RTX 4090-level performance in a $1,300 laptop, and that’s at half the thermal design power (TDP).

During the CES 2025 keynote, Huang spoke about the various GPUs that are on the way to laptops. Availability starts in March, and although no precise release dates have been given yet, we know what to expect in terms of pricing, and we also have a bit of a clue about the performance.

Nvidia’s laptop lineup is fleshed out from the get-go, with the RTX 5090, RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, and the RTX 5070 arriving in March. It’s the RTX 5070 variant that caught my eye. Huang claims that these laptops will start at $1,300 — which is fairly comparable to RTX 40-series variants, if slightly pricier — but they’ll pack performance comparable to an RTX 4090 at half the power.

Huang showed off a fairly slim laptop, marveling at the fact that a massive GPU like the Blackwell card he’d been holding fit inside a small chassis. He credits AI for the ability to supercharge laptops with that kind of performance.

“We’re generating most of the pixels using our Tensor cores. So, we ray trace only the pixels we need, and we generate (using artificial intelligence) all the other pixels we have. As a result, the energy efficiency is off the charts,” said Huang. “The future of computer graphics is neural rendering.”

The RTX 5070-powered laptops will start at $1,299 and will be equipped with 800 AI tera operations per second (TOPS). This metric is hardly the most interesting one to gamers, but it does make a lot of sense in the context of DLSS 4 and how much Nvidia is truly leaning into AI with this generation. The RTX 5070 Ti bumps the price up to $1,599 and TOPS up to 1,000, followed by the RTX 5080 with 1,350 TOPS and a price tag of $2,199 and up.

Unsurprisingly, laptops equipped with the RTX 5090 — standing at a mighty 1,850 AI TOPS — will cost a fortune, starting at $2,899 and above. For context, the desktop version of the RTX 5090 has a recommended list price of $1,999.

I’ll be looking forward to benchmarking some of the best gaming laptops with RTX 50 GPUs once they begin rolling out. If that “RTX 4090 performance” claim turns out to be true, Nvidia might have a hit on its hands.