Forget gaming rigs, Nvidia is now packing its desktop GTX 1080, 1070 and 1060 GPUs into the latest range of gaming laptops and notebooks, giving you incredible performance in a pleasingly portable form.
Forget those hideously dull commutes spent huddled over Candy Crush; soon you’ll be able to blast your way through Doom or Gears of War 4 at well over a hundred frames-per-second on a 120Hz screen, while stuffed inside a train or a bus.
Of course we’ve already seen desktop-level graphics in a gaming laptop, in the form of the MSI Dominator Pro (which packed the VR-ready Nvidia GTX 980 chipset). But now you can expect a full range of new gaming notebooks covering a range of price points, boasting Nvidia’s latest GTX 1080, GTX 1070 and GTX 1060 desktop chipsets (there’s no ‘M’ here). That means hugely improved performance, a serious boost in power efficiency and greater overclocking potential.
What are the specs of Nvidia’s GTX 1080, 1070 and 1060 laptop chipsets, and how do they compare to the full desktop versions?
These latest GPUs boast Nvidia’s impressive Pascal chipset architecture, which offers a 76 percent increase in performance compared with the previous Maxwell generation.
The specs of the new Nvidia GTX laptop chipsets are as follows.
GTX 1080 laptop specs: 2560 CUDA cores, 1733MHz boost clock, 8GB memory, 10Gbps.
GTX 1070 laptop specs: 2048 CUDA cores, 1645MHz boost clock, 8GB memory, 8Gbps.
GTX 1060 laptop specs: 1280 CUDA cores, 1670MHz boost clock, 6GB memory, 8Gbps.
These will be the same chipsets as found in the desktop GTX cards, but configured ever so slightly differently to make them a better fit for a notebook machine.
As with the desktop GPUs, you can also indulge in some overclocking on these new laptops. The Pascal architecture allows up to 250 to 300GHz of overclocking, a bit boost over previous generations.
These laptops also boast Nvidia’s new Dual FET power supply and multi-phased power controllers, which makes for better power efficiency. You can expect up to 30 percent better battery life and you’ll have total control over the power and battery drain balance, managing your laptop’s performance and graphics quality as well as longevity via Nvidia’s software.
What kind of benchmark results and gaming performance can you expect from the Nvidia GTX 1080, 1070 and 1060 laptop chipsets?
On a 120Hz display, you can expect Doom to play with HD visuals at 145FPS, and Rise of the Tomb Raider to run at 125FPS, according to Nvidia. In 4K resolution, Doom still runs at an impressive 70FPS, while Overwatch runs at 89FPS. In Nvidia’s demo session we saw some Gears of War 4 running at 4K UHD resolution, with a perfect frame rate. And of course, it looked absolutely stunning.
We also had a chance to play Gears 4, as well as Doom and other recent fast-paced titles, on a GTX 1070 laptop. Again, the visuals were incredible (everything was pumped up to ultra) and the frame rates were as smooth as butter.
And of course, every laptop that comes packing Nvidia’s desktop GPUs will be VR-ready too, so you can hook up an Oculus Rift or similar VR headset and enjoy some truly immersive gaming. Nvidia’s own VRWorks system currently has over 30 games in development, including Adrift, Raw Data and Everest VR.
What laptops will come with Nvidia’s GTX 1080, 1070 and 1060 desktop chipsets?
We’re expecting lots of these gaming laptops to be released in the tail end of 2016 and 2017, from manufacturers such as Asus, MSI, Alienware, HP, Acer, Lenovo, Razer and Gigabyte.
The only laptop at Nvidia’s event that packed a GTX 1080 was the Clevo P775, which also boasted a gorgeous 4K display. However, there were over a dozen other laptops available to test out at Nvidia’s event which sported the GTX 1070 and 1060, so gamers should be spoilt for choice.
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