Nvidia’s big announcement during its CES press conference yesterday — mobile RTX GPUs for gaming laptops — was an expected one. The company has always worked to find the balance of power consumption, heat production, and the delicate GPU-CPU dance required to fit a desktop graphics chip into the slim, portable package of a notebook. Yet with the RTX 2060 / 2070 / 2080 series, we’re starting to see the delta between what’s been considered “desktop” and laptop gaming performance shrink to unprecedented levels.
But there’s a catch.
At Nvidia’s showroom here in Las Vegas, I was able to try out a small handful of the more than 40 confirmed RTX laptop models coming from its hardware partners starting later this month. The one I was most...