I’ve tested NVIDIA’s new GeForce RTX 4090 laptop GPU in games and creator workloads,
and compared it against the best from last gen, the RTX 3080 Ti!
This is Razer’s new Blade 16, and along with RTX 4090 graphics it also has Intel’s
new 24 core 32 thread Core i9-13950HX processor.
I’m comparing it with the best from Razer’s last gen, the Blade 17 with RTX 3080 Ti, which
is also a larger and heavier laptop.
Now the Blade 16 is an early engineering sample, so performance is subject to change, but I’ve
been told that it should give us a good approximation of expected performance.
This video is not sponsored by NVIDIA, however they did provide both of these laptops so
I can show you some early comparisons.
As NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 40 series laptops are still under embargo, I’m limited in
what I can share, so think of this as an early sneak peak.
This first graph shows the best of what NVIDIA has to offer this year against the best from
last year.
It shows how much faster the new RTX 4090 laptop GPU with DLSS 3 enabled is compared
to the RTX 3080 Ti laptop GPU with DLSS 2.
DLSS 3 introduces NVIDIA’s new frame generation technology, which was enabled on the RTX 4090
and is where a significant amount of the FPS boost is coming from.
Microsoft Flight Simulator saw a 2.6x higher average frame rate with the RTX 4090, as DLSS
3’s frame generation is able to insert frames without input from the game engine, meaning
performance can still be improved even when CPU limited.
This next graph shows how much faster the RTX 4090 laptop GPU with DLSS 3 enabled is
compared to itself with DLSS completely off.
Portal with RTX uses full ray tracing, known as path tracing, so it’s very GPU heavy.
The RTX 4090 laptop GPU was having a tough time with it at 1440p ultra settings without
DLSS.
I actually let out a small laugh while testing after turning on DLSS 3 with frame generation,
because the frame rate increase was just so massive.
It instantly became smooth and playable, with these features increasing the average FPS
by 3.6 times.
Cyberpunk 2077 was also tested with RT on ultra, so another example where DLSS 3 helps
in GPU heavy games.
This next graph shows the latency difference with the RTX 4090 laptop GPU in the same game
selection with DLSS 3 on versus off.
Negative values are better here, as they show a reduction in latency, which is the amount
of time between mouse click and when the image actually changes on screen.
Four of the five games see a latency reduction with DLSS 3 on, as DLSS 3 requires NVIDIA’s
Reflex to be enabled.
To be fair, you can enable Reflex without DLSS, but my DLSS off results were tested
with Reflex off, as requested by NVIDIA for this comparison.
Latency got worse and increased in Microsoft’s Flight Simulator by about 12%, but as we just
saw, DLSS 3 almost doubled average FPS in this game, which I think is a worthwhile tradeoff,
as I don’t think a little higher latency matters much in this game.
Early third party testing initially showed an increase in latency and other visual artifacts
from frame generation in games like Cyberpunk 2077, but at CES 2023 NVIDIA have already
shown improvements with DLSS 3 in this game with an upcoming update, resulting in a smoother
image with clearer text.
My Cyberpunk testing was done with that upcoming update, and I think it’s pretty cool that
it can improve over time with ongoing training with NVIDIA’s AI supercomputer.
From my own testing here, I can’t say that I noticed any obvious visual problems or differences
between DLSS 3 off and on with frame generation.
That said, I’m not much of a pixel peeper, and I haven’t spent any time analyzing these
games frame by frame.
I don’t know about you, but when I play a game as long as it looks and feels fine
then it’s all good.
My eyes might be getting 60, 100, even 300 FPS in some cases.
So even if the results from frame generation aren’t perfect, in the games I tested it
was only a positive experience for me.
There is an argument that 100 FPS with native rendering should look better and have less
latency compared to 100 FPS coming from DLSS 3 with frame generation.
Visual differences between frame generation on and off mean that you’re not necessarily
comparing the same thing, which is fair, but I’m not sure how else to measure these improvements,
it was making the overall experience better.
Especially in games like Portal with RTX, frame generation lets me run it maxed out
with heavy RT effects on a laptop.
And it’s gaming laptops in particular where I think this new feature is going to be interesting,
as they continue to get higher resolution and higher refresh rate screens this generation.
Higher resolution means you need more GPU power to run games, and higher refresh rate
means that ideally you also need more power to hit high FPS to take advantage of it.
Thermals and power are just far more constrained in the smaller laptop form factor compared
to a desktop PC, so this is a useful way to get more out of what we’ve got - at least
in supported games.
On January 3rd 2023, NVIDIA announced at CES that DLSS 3 is present in 17 games, with another
33 games and apps on the way soon.
Unfortunately I’m not able to show rasterization performance differences at this time.
All we’ve got so far is this image provided by NVIDIA during their CES presentation.
It shows two games without DLSS 3 reaching around 50% higher average FPS on the RTX 4090
laptop GPU compared to a last gen RTX 3080 Ti laptop.
Just before we get into more tests, we need to talk about the CPU difference between these
laptops.
The older Blade 17 with RTX 3080 Ti has Intel’s Core i7-12800H, while the newer Blade 16 with
RTX 4090 has Intel’s Core i9-13950HX.
At first that doesn’t sound fair, but at the same time, different generations of processors
paired with different generations of GPU is just how it is.
Next gen RTX 4090 laptops like this are going to be paired with newer processors, and last
gen GPUs with last gen CPUs.
These aren’t desktop PCs, we don’t get to mix and match.
That said, I think it would have been fairer if the RTX 4090 laptop used a 13th gen H series
processor rather than HX, because then it would still have the same core and thread
count as our 12th gen CPU.
At the same time though, I don’t think Razer’s last gen Blade laptops were available with
12th gen HX processors, so this is also a genuine gen on gen update between Razer’s
laptops, but yeah it’s definitely not perfect for comparing only GPU performance.
I’ve previously shown that the difference in games between Intel’s Core i9-12900H
and 12900HX processors is small.
HX only had a 3% lead in a 10 game average, as the extra cores and threads don’t matter
a whole lot in some games once you’ve already got so many.
Though as we can see here, Microsoft’s Flight Simulator had the biggest gain with HX, so
some of the uplift seen earlier on the Blade 16 could in part be due to 13th gen HX.
Alright there’s more to life than just gaming, let’s check out some creator workloads next!
Blender was tested with the Open Data benchmark, so we’ve got the standard Monster, Classroom
and Junkshop tests.
Compared to the last gen RTX 3080 Ti, the new RTX 4090 laptop GPU was almost giving
double the amount of samples per minute in the Classroom test, while the Monster test
was closer to a 2.4x improvement.
I’ve also used the latest version of DaVinci Resolve to convert a 2 minute long 8K 30 FPS
or 4K 30 FPS Pro Res 422 HQ file to H.265.
In both cases, the newer laptop with RTX 4090 graphics was completing the task more than
twice as fast.
It’s worth noting that although the RTX 4090 was close to being maxed out in task
manager for the entire render, all 24 cores of the CPU were also maxed out at 100%, as
ProRes decoding has to be done on the CPU.
Unlike Blender earlier, Resolve isn’t a pure GPU only workload, so some of this difference
would be a result of going from 12th gen i7 H to 13th gen i9 HX CPU.
Regardless, a more than 2.2x speed up is quite a nice gen on gen boost from Razer’s Blade
series.
Both the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 laptop GPUs have two NVENC encoders, and in supported
workloads this will split the frames in half and send each to an encoder.
Basically this should make them faster at encoding compared to the RTX 4070 and below,
and of course the 40 series also adds AV1 support.
Overall, the performance on offer from this new gaming laptop is excellent compared to
what we’ve previously had available.
That said, pricing of such high-end options containing the RTX 4090 is yet to be seen.
Do not expect this hardware to come cheap.
The addition of DLSS 3 looks useful for laptops in supported games, and it’s only going
to get better with updates.
I’ll be comparing laptops with RTX 40 series GPUs in way more games with and without DLSS
as soon as I can, make sure that you’re subscribed!
Until then, you can find out about all the new gaming laptops coming out this year over
here.
There’s even a 14 inch laptop with an RTX 4090!
So I’ll see you in one of those next!