Nearly five months after making its debut for desktop PCs, NVIDIA's latest RTX 20 Series graphics chips are ready for the limelight in laptops. NVIDIA took to the stage at CES 2019 to break the news, heralding what is sure to be the launch of a bevy of gaming laptops making their entrance at the annual trade show.
RTX 20 Series chips for laptops feature the same tech that made their desktop counterparts so exciting for gamers. The biggest highlight of the Turing-based GPUs is the addition of real-time ray tracing, which can drastically improve the realism of lighting in the games that support the feature.
Ray tracing support comes in addition to cores dedicated to assisting with real-time rendering and image processing, significantly speeding things up over the prior generation of best graphics cards from NVIDIA.
As with the desktop chips, NVIDIA's laptop offerings come in a few flavors: RTX 2060, RTX 2070, and RTX 2080. At the entry point, the GeForce RTX 2060 for laptops can perform faster than a desktop-class GTX 1070, NVIDIA says. At the top end, the RTX 2080 for laptops, incredibly, is faster than a GTX 1080 desktop graphics card and can hit more than 60 frames per second in Battlefield V with ray tracing turned on.
The RTX 20 Series for laptops also features NVIDIA's Max-Q tech, which helps keep the cards cool while under load – something that's incredibly important in a laptop form factor.
Laptops with the RTX 20 Series are set for launch from several manufacturers on January 29, with more than 40 different models expected to arrive.
Dan Thorp-Lancaster is the Editor in Chief for Windows Central. He began working with Windows Central as a news writer in 2014 and is obsessed with tech of all sorts. You can follow Dan on Twitter @DthorpL and Instagram @heyitsdtl. Got a hot tip? Send it to daniel.thorp-lancaster@futurenet.com.
