First Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Mobile Benchmarks Show Stunning Improvements

Our sister site PCMag has benchmarked two hulking laptops to analyze the new RTX 4090 and Intel’s Core i9-13980HX CPU. Both laptops are back-breaking in size, weight, and price. The Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 weighs 6.77 pounds, has an 18-inch 2,500-by-1,600 panel, and costs $3,900. The other is the MSI GT77HX Titan, which hasn’t been officially reviewed yet. It has the same basic specs as the Asus notebook but doubles the memory to 64GB of DDR5. It has a slightly smaller 17.3-inch 4K panel with mini LEDs. This is probably a $5,000 laptop, though, as the same version with an RTX 4080 mobile is $4,200 on Newegg.

Real-World Gaming Tests

Both laptops ran three games at 1080p first: Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, F1 2022, and Rainbow Six: Siege. This is just a straight-up, no AI funny business, test of sheer horsepower. DLSS is not engaged, nor is frame generation, so it’s just pure rasterization. Nvidia told the testers that they might see some bottlenecks at 1080p as the 4090 is, at a minimum, a 1440P GPU–at least on mobile.

As you can see, the generation-to-generation uplift is significant. In Assassin’s Creed at 1080p Ultra, the 4090 system is 78% faster than the Lenovo with an RTX 3080 Ti and 12th Gen CPU. It’s a shocking 148% faster than the AMD-powered Asus ROG Zephrys Duo, also with a 3080 Ti. That laptop has a Ryzen 9 6980HX CPU, too, which is AMD’s flagship mobile CPU from its previous generation. In the other two games, the pattern repeats. The RTX 4090 is roughly 40 to 70% faster than the previous generation systems at “ultra” 1080p settings. In some tests, it’s almost twice as fast, which is surprising.

4K and 144op With DLSS and Frame Generation

The Geforce 40 series allows for DLSS 3 and frame generation in supported titles. Not every gamer will appreciate frame generation as it can introduce latency. However, Nvidia has added its Reflex technology to combat this side effect. DLSS 3 and frame generation are only supported in 17 games right now, so it’s not something you’ll be using often. Still, the results are impressive.

Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K shows the advantages of these technologies. Without any AI assistance, the game is unplayable at 20fps. Turning on DLSS 3 boosts that number to a respectable 57fps. Enabling frame generation bumps it up to 84fps, a huge improvement. We see the same pattern in F1 2022. It goes from not playable, to quite playable, to high fps as you tick all the AI boxes. Even at 1440p in F1 2022, we see the frame rate doubling from DLSS off to DLSS plus frame generation. Clearly, these technologies are working as intended.

The only downside to these monstrous laptops seems to be their size, weight, and price. However, if you’re in the market for such a beast, you know what you’re getting. There is no other way to get this much portable power at the moment. We’re still waiting for AMD to release its Dragon Range laptops, which leaks have shown to be formidable machines, as well as the company’s RDNA 3 mobile chips. We’ll have to wait for a head-to-head showdown.

Now read:

• EVGA Puts One of Its RTX 4090 Prototypes Up for Auction
• CES 2023: Nvidia Launches RTX 4070 Ti, Ada Lovelace Mobile, GeForce Now With RTX 4080
• Chrome and Edge Browsers to Get Nvidia RTX AI Video Upscaling