Nvidia recently announced their new 20 series of RTX graphics cards, so with those just
around the corner should you buy a laptop now or is it worth the wait?
Let’s discuss.
The Nvidia announcements at Gamescom primarily revolved around the RTX 2070, 2080, and 2080Ti
desktop cards without any specific mention as to when or even if we’ll be seeing new
laptops with RTX, so at this time there isn’t actually any official information, this video
is based on my own thoughts, opinions, and essentially best guesses.
When Nvidia has launched desktop graphics in the past laptops would soon follow, but
even once the laptop graphics have become available there are usually only a limited
number of models featuring them immediately available, it will of course vary between
vendor but some may simply take longer to refresh their lineups with the newer GPUs.
While the past is by no means an indication of the future, it can help us to gain an understanding
of how Nvidia works.
We know that the RTX 2080 and 2080Ti cards are scheduled to launch on the 20th of September
this year, with the 2070 due later with nothing else officially confirmed yet.
For reference here are the launch dates for the desktop and laptop 10 series graphics,
the differences vary quite a bit between card.
For instance, the GTX 1060 6GB was launched on July 19 2016, but the laptop 1060 was launched
on August 16 2016, around a month later, but the 1050 and 1050Ti didn’t get laptop launches
until 3 months after their desktop counterparts, and some of the others also had a similar
3 month gap, so based on this we’ll probably still have some months to go after September.
What about performance boosts?
Many people have been speculating that as Nvidia didn’t actually show the gaming performance
of these new RTX cards there might not be that much of an improvement.
Instead the main focus has been around ray tracing, hence the rebranding from GTX to
RTX.
While there is interesting technology in these cards for this, until games are updated to
take advantage of it there may not be too much of a performance difference in most titles,
but we’ll have to wait for the benchmarks before we can really know for sure, although
we can take educated guesses based on things like the cuda cores and clock speeds.
Power is another important factor, for instance if we compare the new desktop GPUs with their
10 series counterparts we can see that the new 20 series has a higher TDP.
This is quite a big deal when it comes to moving things over into a laptop, as you’ve
got to consider things like power draw, battery size, and cooling.
It will be interesting to see if these will be cut down at all when the laptop models
come around.
Let’s move onto pricing.
If the high end desktop models are an indication of overall generation pricing then we’re
probably going to be looking at higher cost laptop options too, but that could vary depending
on how much they cut them down.
I’ll skip the 2080Ti as we never had laptops with the 1080Ti, so let’s just assume that
we’ll have laptops with the 2070 and possibly 2080 in the higher end laptops for arguments
sake.
The differences in the desktop parts at launch were around $100, so there would probably
be a similar increase to laptops featuring these GPUs to some degree.
It may even be the case that we don’t see RTX graphics in laptops at all, and instead
also get some kind of upgraded GTX series without the ray tracing components, we’ll
just have to wait and see, I’m just guessing here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we
only see RTX versions of these higher end cards and then just get a GTX 2050 and 2060
options further down the line for laptops.
Assuming the performance in games isn’t actually that different then it really comes
down to whether or not you’ll benefit from ray tracing, and I think we’ve still got
some time to go before games really start taking advantage of that anyway with this
new first gen hardware.
So should you wait for these new RTX graphics options before buying a new laptop or buy
now?
To be honest it really depends how badly you need a new laptop, and whether you think you’d
actually benefit from the ray tracing capabilities of these new options as that seems to be where
the biggest gains will be.
If you need a laptop today, then I’d say just buy it now, it doesn’t seem like there
will be that much to gain if and when these finally come to laptops, otherwise if you
can wait a few months then might as well, if there are new laptops even if you don’t
buy one maybe you can get a nice deal on the 10 series which will probably still be a pretty
great option for a while yet in my opinion, despite already being a couple of years old
now.
Hopefully this video has been useful, while I’m interested in the new graphics cards
and can’t wait to benchmark them and compare them with the 10 series I don’t plan on
boarding the hype train, I just wanted to give you my thoughts on the topic as quite
a few of you asked me about Nvidia RTX laptops in recent comments.
Let me know what you guys think we’ll be seeing with regards to new 20 series laptops
in the comments, and don’t forget to subscribe for future tech videos like this one.