First Tests! Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop GPU Is a Scorcher (With a Big Caveat)

After a rash of major consumer-silicon announcements at CES 2023, we're getting the first wave of new laptops bringing new features and hardware from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia. One of the biggest announcements was the launch of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 40-series mobile GPUs, bringing the company's latest graphics hardware to laptops.

With Nvidia's latest “Ada Lovelace” architecture and an arsenal of new technologies, the mobile GeForce RTX 4090 GPU promises the fastest, smoothest gaming yet. (The mobile version of the GeForce RTX 4080 also launches in laptops today, alongside the RTX 4090; lower-end RTX 40-series chips are coming later.) Plus, with new Tensor Cores providing an amped-up version of DLSS (now in version 3), it's a huge advancement over previous models. The updated tech adds AI-powered graphics that can actually as much as double the frame rates under the right circumstances.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Now: No way these laptops can possibly perform as well as the desktop version of the GeForce RTX 4090, a foot-long, inches-thick mega video card. (Thermal limits are thermal limits, and physics is physics.) We got our hands on two of the first laptops available with the new GeForce RTX 4090 mobile chip, and we didn't waste a minute before taking them straight to the test bench to see what the new hardware is really capable of.

So, just how fast is Nvidia's best mobile graphics for 2023? Spoiler/TLDR: When it comes to DLSS 3-enabled games, the gains are sky-high, but the speed hop-up is less eye-popping when running anything else (though still better than before). Let's go over the basics first.

The 411 on the Nvidia GeForce RTX 40-Series

The new Nvidia GeForce RTX 4000-series laptop graphics cards feature several new and improved technologies, all designed to provide major performance gains and better power efficiency than ever before.

These technologies include those aforementioned fourth-generation Tensor cores, third-generation RT cores for ray tracing, ultra-low-voltage GDDR6 graphics memory, and tri-speed memory control that lets the GPU automatically switch to lower-power memory states.

But the hardware is only one part of Nvidia's formula for screaming-fast performance. The rest starts with DLSS 3, which ramps up Nvidia's supersampling resolution technology, now with Optical Multi Frame Generation and Nvidia Reflex low-latency tech, to rocket past even the top performers from last year. (See this article for a primer on supersampling, albeit geared toward the technology on desktops.)

(Credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia's Optical Multi Frame Generation technology lets the GPU generate new, additional frames in real time, without using the game engine—these are extra frames cooked up entirely by the card, effectively doubling the frame rate. It does this with AI-driven analysis of every pixel of every frame generated by a game, mapping the geometry, particles, reflections, shadows, and lighting, extrapolating an entirely new frame that can be inserted between every other frame. The end result is a faster, smoother experience; under the hood, the game engine isn't doing more work, only the GPU is.

Latency is also shaved down to pretty much nothing using Nvidia Reflex. The new technology synchronizes the GPU and CPU, boosting frame rates even in CPU-bottlenecked games. When a game requires more CPU power to drive in-game physics, Reflex lets the GPU crank out twice as many frames, without introducing any latency.

This all adds up to a massive improvement in GPU power and improved gaming performance—if you're playing a game that supports DLSS 3. But DLSS 3 is only supported by 17 games at the time of writing, limiting the appeal and applicability of this aspect of the new GPU considerably.

(Credit: Nvidia)

Now, Nvidia promises that another 33 games will be getting DLSS 3 support in the near future. Without DLSS 3, the new cards promise real performance gains, but nothing so dramatic as when the entire technology stack can be applied.

Let's look at the first test numbers we've logged to get a better idea of what this actually means.

Testing Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop GPU: DLSS 3 Dominance, Smaller Gains Elsewhere

To test the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, we looked at the first two gaming laptops to come to PC Labs with the new hardware, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 and the MSI GT77 Titan.

The Asus ROG Strix Scar 18, which we reviewed in parallel for this launch, comes to us with a powerful Intel Core i9-13980HX processor, 32GB of RAM, and an 18-inch 2,560-by-1,600 display with a peak 240Hz refresh rate. This is, of course, in addition to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 laptop GPU and its 16GB of video RAM. The MSI Titan GT77 HX (review forthcoming) also packs an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, along with the same Intel Core i9-13980HX, but it beefs up the offering with 64GB of memory and a 17.3-inch 4K mini LED display.

Both are impressive systems, but they diverge on some important points. Their native display resolutions are obviously different. (The 4K testing was done on an external display, where appropriate.) But the Asus is also noticeably slimmer, with the MSI offering the bulkier build that is necessary for more aggressive thermal management.

To see just how much of an improvement Nvidia's latest laptop GPU brings to the table, we're comparing these two early beasts with some of the most powerful laptops from 2022. This includes a trio of Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti-powered models: the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16, the Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 7, and the HP ZBook Studio G9 workstation.

We're also looking at AMD-powered competitors, like the Corsair Voyager a1600, which uses an AMD Ryzen 9 CPU and Radeon RX 6800M GPU, and at the Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch (2023, M2 Max), which features Apple's beefiest laptop graphics to date. Finally, for the sake of complete comparisons, we included scores from the Apple Mac Studio desktop with the M1 Ultra processor, Apple's most powerful CPU/GPU option thus far. Neither Apple machine could run all of our Windows tests, but wherever we have relevant and comparable numbers, we've included them in the charts below.

The results speak for themselves below, but we'll sum it up like this: The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 mobile GPU is a step up in performance, as we'd expect from the hottest graphics chip to come to gaming laptops. But the hardware can only provide an incremental improvement on its own, so you'll want to look to DLSS 3-enabled games to get the most out of the new hardware.

GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop: Synthetic Benchmark Tests

We start our testing with our usual batch of synthetic graphics tests, which produce a score to indicate the overall level of graphics capability.

We use two tests from UL's 3DMark that simulate gaming with DirectX 12, a less demanding test called Night Raid (which we often run on non-gaming systems as our baseline test) and Time Spy, which is more suited to gaming systems with a discrete GPU. Higher scores indicate better performance.

We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines, like texturing, and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

Across the board, we see leading scores from the GeForce RTX 4090-equipped Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 and MSI GT77 Titan. In 3DMark Time Spy, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 produces performance that is 18% higher than the RTX 3080 Ti-equipped Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 7.

The results are far more pronounced in GFXBench, where we see a 100% increase between the older Lenovo Legion and the new RTX 4090-equipped MSI GT77 Titan. Coming in much closer is the more recent Apple Mac Studio, with the top-of-the-line M1 Ultra processor, and even that machine is beaten by a large margin.

GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop: Gaming Benchmarks

Next, we turn to real-world games for a clearer look at what the new graphics hardware can do.

We start with our standard game tests, which we use when reviewing any gaming laptop, using the in-game benchmarks for F1 2021, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege. These represent simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive/esports shooter games, respectively. Valhalla and Siege are run twice (Valhalla at Medium and Ultra quality, Siege at Low and Ultra quality), while F1 2021 is run twice at maximum settings, first with Nvidia’s performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing setting turned off, and then again with it on.

For comparison's sake, we generally run all tests at 1080p resolution, and we've done so here as well. However, Nvidia tells us that, for many games, full HD resolution isn't high enough to see the best performance from the graphics card, and that 1080p testing may not even engage the GPU on some games, so we're doing some additional testing beyond our standard set of game benchmarks. (Note that we had troubles getting the Valhalla title to run on the MSI GT77, so it's excluded from that chart.)

Regardless of Nvidia's resolution warning, we see substantially higher frame rates in all of our game tests across the board.

In Assassin's Creed Valhalla, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 pumps out 159 frames per second (fps) on the Ultra High detail setting, close to doubling what we see from the Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 7 in the same test, and beating out the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 and Corsair Voyager a1600 by even larger margins.

In F1 2021, the RTX 4090-equipped MSI and Asus gaming laptops peg scores in the 160s and 170s, leaving even the highest performers from the GeForce RTX 30-series generation in the dust.

Finally, on the less graphically-demanding Rainbow Six: Siege, we see frame rates creep into the 400fps-to-500fps range, where past models top out in the high 300s. Comparing the same settings between the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 (RTX 3080 Ti-based) and the MSI GT77 Titan, we see a whopping 37% frame-rate increase.

GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop: Advanced Game Testing

To thoroughly test the high-resolution performance of the new GPU, we're doing some additional testing on both of the RTX 4090 laptops. This includes the F1 2021 tests, run again at 4K resolution. But to truly get a sense for what DLSS 3 and the new frame generation (“FG,” in the charts) technologies bring to the table, we're also testing the laptops with the games Cyberpunk 2077 and F1 2022, which both support DLSS 3 and Nvidia's other advanced features.

Starting with F2 2021 at 4K, we're doing this in two runs, one with DLSS turned off, and again with DLSS on. Without the boost of DLSS, we still see superb frame rates, with the MSI cranking out 74fps, and the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 eking out a slightly better 79fps. But, when we turn on DLSS, we see a significant boost, as the MSI jumps to 93fps and the Asus climbs to 114fps.

Things get even more interesting when we turn on frame generation in games like Cyberpunk 2077 and F1 2022.

In Cyberpunk, running the in-game benchmark at 4K resolution, we start with relatively low frame rates with DLSS turned off. The Asus and MSI turn in unplayable frame rates of 20fps and 21fps, respectively. But, when DLSS is on, those rates jump to a far better 57fps and 61fps, and then jump again when frame generation is turned on, up to 84fps and 90fps, respectively. That's an astonishing improvement, going from unplayable to notably smooth, even at full 4K resolution.

We see this pattern repeat itself in the newer F1 2022. With DLSS and frame generation turned off, the game is playable, but frame rates of 36fps and 40fps aren't impressive for laptops of this caliber. With both technologies turned on, frames rates jump to 85fps on the Asus ROG Scar 18, and an even higher 92fps from the MSI.

Moreover, when we dial down the resolution to 1440p, which is far more reasonable a resolution setting for even the best gaming laptops, frame rates positively explode, with the Asus and MSI producing 169fps and 173fps, respectively, with DLSS on and FG engaged. The result is clearly a more playable game on those titles that support Nvidia's latest technologies.

Nvidia's Mobile RTX 4090 Is a Game Changer…in Fewer Than Two Dozen Games

In our final analysis, it's clear that the latest RTX 4090 mobile GPU delivers better performance for any game compared to its predecessors, though it's an incremental step forward for most titles versus an RTX 3080 Ti. But if you're using a laptop that's more than a couple of years old, getting a gaming laptop with an RTX 4090, if you're in the market (and tax bracket!) for a top-end GPU, is a worthwhile upgrade for that alone. But that's not where the new GPU really shines.

The combination of new technologies is the real game changer, with features like DLSS 3 and frame generation allowing for incredible detail, unparalleled smoothness, and lightning-fast gameplay even when running demanding titles at 4K resolution. But to get the best from these chips, you need to be running a game that supports those extras, and that's where Nvidia's massive performance jumps get a great big asterisk after them.

Right now, at launch of the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080, the list of games that support those changes is 17. Even with the coming titles that Nvidia has promised will come with DLSS 3 support baked in, we're still talking about only 50 games out of the thousands of titles on the market.

Yes, this support will be offered on the top games from big studios, but we really hope to see a lot more opportunities for DLSS 3 to shine, because it's a true innovation. We just hope there's enough support to make the upgrade worthwhile.