NVIDIA has announced the release of its latest 40-series GPUs for laptops, with references for the 4050 all the way up to the 4090 available for portable desktop replacements. The chips feature Ada Lovelace, the latest mobile-efficient architecture which the company claims breaks the energy efficiency barrier in laptop designs.
Ada Lovelace is based on NVIDIA’s new Ampere architecture, which was designed specifically to deliver improved energy efficiency and performance in laptops. It uses a number of innovative techniques to achieve this, including a redesigned streaming multiprocessor and new memory architecture with 5th-generation Max-Q improvements.
NVIDIA says this will result in as much as three times the “power efficiency” of the previous generation at just a third of the total energy cost — a recipe that could potentially help laptop makers achieve longer battery life (up to triple the longevity compared to previous generations, according to NVIDIA) and more stable thermal temperatures. Better yet, these exciting boosts will benefit smaller form factors.
More power, less heft
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For gaming, NVIDIA specifically called out ray-traced games as the biggest beneficiary of the latest architecture improvements, with an “RT Overdrive” mode touting up to four times better performance in titles like “Cyberpunk 2077.” What’s that mean? You’ll be able to enjoy the full graphical fidelity of these games the way developers intended, giving you all the newest bells and whistles without taking a huge hit to framerate. Full DLSS 3 support helps here, too.
But this 40-series launch is also heavily geared toward professional creatives. One of its claims is huge rendering time savings for 3D modeling suites like Blender – a rendering queue that took 2 hours on older hardware could now be completed in as little as 10 minutes, according to NVIDIA. It also features dual AV1 encoders for better live streaming performance and up to 50% faster video rendering.
Better yet, it’s said that models on the lower end of 40-series GPUs — comprising the 4050, 4060, and 4070 — comfortably fit within the increasingly popular 14-inch form factor. In years past, you’d have to sacrifice portability for power, but it sounds like this ultralight workhorse will be able to double as your gaming laptop, which is a boon for the shoulders of backpack-carriers everywhere.
The first 4080 and 4090 gaming laptops will ship February 8 starting at $1,999, while 4050 through 4070 models will arrive February 22 for a $999 starting price. More than 170 40-series models are already in development.
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Lloyd Buresh