Nvidia’s Ampere architecture is going mobile. The company revealed its plans and partnerships to bring GeForce RTX 30-series GPUs to more than 70 laptops throughout 2021. This includes notebooks with the RTX 3060, RTX 3070, and RTX 3080 all using Nvidia’s mobile-optimized Max-Q technology.
“After taking the desktop market by storm, our Nvidia Ampere architecture is now powering the world’s fastest laptops,” Nvidia Geforce OEM general manager Kaustubh Sanghani said. “Nowhere does power efficiency matter more than in gaming laptops, a market that’s grown [sevenfold] in the past seven years. These new thin and light systems are based on our Max-Q technologies, where every aspect — CPU, GPU, software, PCB design, power delivery, thermals — is optimized for power and performance.”
Laptops with RTX 3070 and 3080 processors will begin launching later this month. RTX 3060 laptops will follow later.
RTX 3060 laptops start at $1,000. RTX 3070 laptops starts at $1,300, and Nvidia claims this is ideal for 90 frames per second at 1440p. RTX 3080 laptops, which use 16GB of GDDR6 memory instead of 10GB GDDR6x, start at $2,000.
Nvidia is beefing up its Max-Q mobile tech for this generation beyond raw power. The company is introducing Dynamic Boost 2.0, which uses AI to shift power between CPU and GPU. WhisperMode 2.0 is even better at enabling laptop owners to set their desired noise level and then setting the system to meet those demands.
These systems also use resizable BAR, which enables laptops to share the video card’s RAM with the CPU. This results in performance improvements of approximately 10%.
