Enthusiast laptop hardware isn’t ridiculed these days. Especially not on this day. The new flagship mobile components from Intel and Nvidia are finally on the shelves, and the massive laptops they run on are incredibly efficient.
And there’s nothing surprising here, but Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4090 for laptops is absolutely ferocious. While not an exact replica of its desktop counterpart (a sore point for some Internet users), this GPU still shows huge improvements over its predecessor, the RTX 3080 Ti, although it appears to use less power.
How big? I think performance increases by 70 percent in our tests. This GPU is a powerful force backed by impressive technology, and it bodes well for future laptops. Our YouTube video details the key points (as tested on the monstrous MSI Titan GT77 with Core i9-13980HX and Nvidia RTX 4090), read on.
Curious about how the equally brand new Intel Core i9-13980HX performs? We also have a rundown of its performance.
Breakthrough performance
Regardless of the gaming test, the RTX 4090 delivers impressive frame rates. This fact cannot be denied when you see the numbers, especially in the corresponding 3DMark DX12 synthetic benchmarks.
Gordon Mah Ung / PCWorld
These benchmarks are not a game that can be played in the real world, but they do simulate the workloads your GPU faces when you play AAA games. And when you isolate GPU performance, the new RTX 4090 is up to over 60 percent faster than the 3080 Ti. In both Time Spy and Time Spy Extreme, which are tested at 1440p and 4K respectively, the 4090 is outperformed by about 65 percent.
You’ll see similar results in Port Royal, which tests overall ray tracing performance at 1440p. Even in the new Speed Way test, which adds evaluation of the new ray tracing features at 1440p, the 4090 delivers nearly a 70 percent boost.
It seems almost unrealistic – and in a sense it is. Real world benchmarks for the GeForce RTX 4090 have more nuance in how a certain frame rate is achieved (as you’ll see shortly). But this performance snapshot remains astounding.
DLSS 3 is still incredible
Tests in released games are where the rubber hits the road, even if the test is a built-in feature. They give a better idea of what to expect in a landscape where some games support technologies that can increase frame rates, are optimized for certain hardware, or even run slightly slower on PC.
Longer bars indicate better performance. Right-click (on PC) or press and hold (on phone) to open the full size image in a new window. Gordon Mah Ung / PCWorld
The picture our real-world gaming benchmarks for the RTX 4090 paint is a picture of a GPU that beats previous frame rate expectations. Whether it’s rasterization or ray tracing, it doesn’t matter. Take, for example, the 2019 Quake II RTX, a traceable version of the venerable game from the 90s. The amount of ray tracing in this release punishes the graphics cards, as seen from the RTX 3080 Ti’s 29fps in 4K – barely playable by today’s standards. The RTX 4090 bumps that frame rate up by over 60 percent, bringing it closer to the baseline of 60fps.
Gordon Mah Ung / PCWorld
Gordon Mah Ung / PCWorld
Longer bars indicate better performance. Right-click (on PC) or press and hold (on phone) to open the full size image in a new window. Gordon Mah Ung / PCWorld
Meanwhile, in a few games where we just set the graphics settings to Ultra and let the test pass, you’ll see a significant (albeit slightly smaller) percentage increase. At 4K, we got a 55% increase in Dirt 5, a 51% increase in Gears Tactics, and a 44% increase in Strange Brigade. Not shabby.
Things get more interesting when Nvidia’s frame rate-boosting technology comes into play. DLSS 2.0 is already helping to counteract the demands of ray tracing, as you can see in games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider – while the 3080 Ti in 4K offered a comfortable 74fps in both ray traced and balanced DLSS mode. The GeForce RTX 4090 gives you smooth 120fps.
Longer bars indicate better performance. Right-click (on PC) or press and hold (on phone) to open the full size image in a new window. Gordon Mah Ung / PCWorld
But DLSS 3, oh my god, this advanced technology magically affects the frame rate. Its new frame generation technology, which relies on AI technology to create frames interleaved with those rendered on the GPU, greatly improves performance. A look at Cyberpunk 2077 with Psycho settings and ray tracing shows this clearly even in 4K.
Longer bars indicate better performance. Right-click (on PC) or press and hold (on phone) to open the full size image in a new window. Gordon Mah Ung / PCWorld
Without frame generation, the performance improvement is already as much as 57 percent. (And from a practical standpoint, a more playable 48fps.) But with him? Jump increases by almost 200 percent at 89 fps. DLSS 3 has a caveat, which is the potential introduction of lag into gameplay, especially if you forgot to enable Nvidia Reflex in the meantime, but the tech is still just as exciting as it was last fall.
In fact, it can be more exciting on laptops. Smaller and thinner laptops will also feature powerful RTX 4090s and 4080s like the Asus Zephyrus M16. Often times downsizing will affect performance, but DLSS 3 can reduce the difference between a slender 14-inch laptop and a giant 17-inch laptop in gaming.
Content creation is also gaining momentum
Not everyone buys a high-end laptop for gaming – sure, maybe after hours, but during the day? Time to break some work.
While some production tasks are better performed using the CPU (like the Core i9-13980HK that our review sample ran), others benefit from shifting the load to the graphics chip. And in such scenarios, the RTX 4090 offers a nice performance boost.
Gordon Mah Ung / PCWorld
Shorter bars indicate better performance. Right-click (on PC) or press and hold (on phone) to open the full size image in a new window. Gordon Mah Ung / PCWorld
Although not as overwhelming as in games, the numbers still increase significantly. In Blender, a program that is said to render faster on the GPU than on the CPU, the speed increased by as much as 31 percent. Meanwhile, in our at-home Handbrake encoding test, converting a 4K video formatted as a QuickTime (.mov) file to the more compact H.265 format was 25 percent faster.
Longer bars indicate better performance. Right-click (on PC) or press and hold (on phone) to open the full size image in a new window. Gordon Mah Ung / PCWorld
The only oddity in our tests came with Adobe products – although the results showed a 20 percent increase in GPU performance, the overall results looked subdued. It’s an odd result to be explored, but at least in principle, the RTX 4090 matters.
Better Efficiency, More Laptop Diversity
PC/Asus World
Not too long ago, size mattered to performance. You simply couldn’t expect stunning results from thin and light laptops. They were great travel companions for basic productivity tasks, but hard work? Forget it.
But the GeForce RTX 4090 demonstrates just how much more efficient Nvidia’s Lovelace architecture is. It outperforms its 3080 Ti predecessor with the same amount of power available and doesn’t even use all the power. Our preliminary results show that the RTX 4090 reduces the power consumption of the 3080 Ti by 20W.
This likely plays a role in the surprisingly small laptops the RTX 4090 is due to appear in, such as the ever-popular Asus Zephyrus G14. Even with the design limitations of a smaller chassis, this proliferation of Nvidia’s flagship mobile GPU bodes well. If the RTX 4090 will fit in a sub-four-pound laptop, just think of all the ultra-thin performance laptops that the inevitable 4070 and 4060 can squeeze into.
The MSI Titan GT77 we used for testing is available for pre-order for $5,299 – squeezing every ounce of possible performance out of the latest, greatest technology can’t be cheap. Expect to see more GeForce RTX 4090 laptops soon. Keep an eye on PCWorld’s best laptops for a hands-on guide to the latest deals.