With the way Nvidia made mobile GPUs before, the 4070M is all you need. The model numbers on their mobile cards didn’t really matter much, what really mattered was how much power you could pump into them and how well the cooler worked. An 90 class card would be beaten by a 70 class with decent cooling.
However, Nvidia’s power requirements have become absolutely ridiculous over time. There’s no 4090M that makes sense without disingenuous labeling. You’ll end up with one of those monster laptops that requires two power cords to function. They exist, but they’re not exactly good marketing material.
I suspect the future of gaming laptops may very well lie in external GPUs. Now that USB 4(Thunderbolt 3 is becoming commonplace, eGPUs are starting to make sense. Just grab yourself a laptop with a high-end CPU (preferably Intel as AMD still hasn’t figured out the whole Thunderbolt thing well) and any matching GPU if your choice in an external box. You get the benefits of a laptop you can carry with you without risk of back injuries and the gaming performance of the common luggable. Plus, you’re not stuck with the nerfed “mobile” version of GPUs that these companies name like desktop GPUs but sometimes end up being completely different architectures, let alone having any performance similarity to their desktop counterparts.
PC handhelds may also be eating part of the market segment. Gaming laptops make sense for someone in the move with an extensive PC games library, but handhelds easily replace that market trend. You can probably get your needs fulfilled with an ROG Ally or Legion or whatever it’s called, and throw in a mid tier Chromebook for the homework and office work that needs doing. Only the people that want the power hungry 100W+ mobile GPUs are getting stiffed in that regard, and they’re a niche within a niche.
I do expect laptops with a 5090M to come out next year, maybe even this year, but they’re not in a form factor that companies want to show off at trade shows anymore. We’re moving to a world where laptops with 4K screens lasting more than 24 hours on a battery is valued more than 30 minutes of mobile GPU gaming at 120Hz.
With the way Nvidia made mobile GPUs before, the 4070M is all you need. The model numbers on their mobile cards didn’t really matter much, what really mattered was how much power you could pump into them and how well the cooler worked. An 90 class card would be beaten by a 70 class with decent cooling.
However, Nvidia’s power requirements have become absolutely ridiculous over time. There’s no 4090M that makes sense without disingenuous labeling. You’ll end up with one of those monster laptops that requires two power cords to function. They exist, but they’re not exactly good marketing material.
I suspect the future of gaming laptops may very well lie in external GPUs. Now that USB 4(Thunderbolt 3 is becoming commonplace, eGPUs are starting to make sense. Just grab yourself a laptop with a high-end CPU (preferably Intel as AMD still hasn’t figured out the whole Thunderbolt thing well) and any matching GPU if your choice in an external box. You get the benefits of a laptop you can carry with you without risk of back injuries and the gaming performance of the common luggable. Plus, you’re not stuck with the nerfed “mobile” version of GPUs that these companies name like desktop GPUs but sometimes end up being completely different architectures, let alone having any performance similarity to their desktop counterparts.
PC handhelds may also be eating part of the market segment. Gaming laptops make sense for someone in the move with an extensive PC games library, but handhelds easily replace that market trend. You can probably get your needs fulfilled with an ROG Ally or Legion or whatever it’s called, and throw in a mid tier Chromebook for the homework and office work that needs doing. Only the people that want the power hungry 100W+ mobile GPUs are getting stiffed in that regard, and they’re a niche within a niche.
I do expect laptops with a 5090M to come out next year, maybe even this year, but they’re not in a form factor that companies want to show off at trade shows anymore. We’re moving to a world where laptops with 4K screens lasting more than 24 hours on a battery is valued more than 30 minutes of mobile GPU gaming at 120Hz.
idunno, we’ve been saying that for years and it just isn’t catching on. I think it’s just too complicated to support, market, etc.
Nah, it’s because $400 for a GPU enclosure is insane, at that rate I can just get the mid-range GPU built in with the regular price of the laptop