At CES 2021, Nvidia presented its GeForce RTX 3000 series GPUs for laptops. These are of course led by the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 – a graphics card that has become the flagship for 4K PC games in 2020. However, of all the gaming laptops announced at the virtual event, very few have opted for 4K gaming. and instead went all-in on FHD and QHD panels with higher refresh rates.
And it’s damn time.
Who needs a 4K display?
If it’s a laptop display that is around 15 or even 17 inches, then 4K resolution is completely unnecessary. We spend hours looking at laptop displays of all sizes and resolutions, and there are few devices that we could ever look at and say, “This is a 4K screen” if it’s not a full-size monitor .
For example, if you look at a 27-inch 4K gaming monitor, you see a pixel density of 163 PPI, and that’s basically considered the gold standard. Then if you look at a 15-inch laptop but reduce the screen resolution to 2K or 2560 x 1440, it actually does More Pixel density than the 27-inch 4K display with 195.81 PPI. Essentially, you have a more pixelated display on the laptop without the extra power that a 4K display needs.
In the past few years, as laptop makers realized that many creatives were buying gaming laptops to work on, new options emerged. For this reason, Gigabyte, for example, has renamed its aero laptops to focus more on creatives looking to take advantage of their downtime rather than all-in games. No wonder the Gigabyte Aorus 17G is primarily a 1080p laptop with a high refresh rate, while the Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED includes a lush 4K OLED panel.
This division of the gaming laptop market between gaming devices and creative devices – even if the latter have much the same internal hardware – results in products that make more sense to their respective audiences, and nobody has to pay for features they don’t need to pay for .
So it seems that the 4K gaming laptop is disappearing from the market, which is great news. Not only does a 120Hz display make more sense for a device that is purely designed for gaming, but the hardware required to make 4K gaming a generally positive experience isn’t there yet.
There’s an RTX 3080 now, but just kind of
When we tested the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, we found that it could handle just about any game under the sun at 4K with minimal problems. And now that you can buy a gaming laptop with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, you might think you can start any game in 4K and tweak the settings at high frame rates.
There certainly are some games that you can do this with no problem, but you have to keep in mind that desktop and mobile graphics are not exactly the same. Nvidia hasn’t listed the full specs on its website, however Anandtech has a helpful table to refer to until we get one of these laptops internally for testing.
According to the specifications listed by Anandtech, the mobile RTX 3080 has 6,144 CUDA cores with a boost clock between 1,245 and 1,710 MHz (to be configured by laptop manufacturers). For comparison: the desktop class RTX 3080 has 8,704 CUDA cores with a boost clock of 1.71 GHz.
That’s quite a big difference, and it means the mobile-class RTX 3080 probably won’t be the 4K powerhouse that its desktop sibling is. Well, there’s a good reason why the mobile version of the graphics card is so cut off from the desktop version. It just doesn’t make sense to put such a performance-hungry graphics card in a mobile form factor. Not only would the battery life be absolutely miserable, but the laptop would also have to be thick enough to look like it was straight from 2004.
Since the RTX 3080 of the mobile class is closer to a RTX 3070 of the desktop class in terms of raw data, it makes sense that even Nvidia offers it as a 1440p GPU. There have been many last generation gaming laptops trying to market 4K versions of their laptops, but this only resulted in players having to manually lower their in-game resolution to get a playable frame rate.
This is definitely just part of PC gaming, but it’s still not a great experience, especially for someone new to the platform and just wanting a working product. All of the gaming laptops announced at CES 2021 have super high refresh rates that are just as difficult to use as a 4K screen. However, getting 60 fps on a 1080p 360Hz display is a much less terrifying experience than 20 fps on a 4K display.
So let’s say bring up the faster laptop displays.
Source link : https://www.techradar.com/news/at-ces-2021-4k-gaming-laptops-are-finally-starting-to-die-off/
