Nvidia Brings Its Super Game to Laptops: RTX 2080, 2070 Super, Along With Improved Ma

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Optimus also finally supports G-Sync.

It’s a big day for gaming laptops. Intel is taking the official wraps off its 10th Gen H-Series processors (countering AMD’s impressive new Ryzen 4000 chips). And Nvidia is finally bringing its Turing-based Super cards to laptops, in the form of the new RTX 2080 Super and RTX 2070 Super.

Not content to just deliver new silicon to the portable gaming space, Nvidia is also offering up improvements to its laptop-slimming Max-Q tech, as well as finally bringing power-saving Optimus Technology support to systems with screen-smoothing G-Sync displays. But first, let’s take a look at the specs for Nvidia’s new laptop lineup:

GeForce RTX 2080 Super GeForce RTX 2070 Super GeForce RTX 2070 GeForce RTX 2060 GeForce RTX 1660 Ti GeForce RTX 1650 Ti GeForce RTX 1650
Nvidia CUDA Cores
3072 2560 2304 1920 1536 1024 Up to 1024
Boost Clock
1080-1560 MHz 1155-1380 MHz 1125-1455 MHz 1185-1560 MHz 1335-1590 MHz 1200-1485 MHz 1125-1560 MHz
Memory Configuration
8GB DDR6 8GB DDR6 8GB DDR6 6GB DDR6 6GB DDR6 4GB DDR6 6GB DDR6, 4GB DDR5
Memory Interface Width
256-bit 256-bit 256-bit 192-bit 192-bit 128-bit 128-bit
Memory Bandwidth (GBps)
Up to 448 GBps Up to 448 GBps Up to 448 GBps Up to 336 GBps 288 GBps Up to 192 GBps Up to 192 GBps
Total Graphics Power (TGP, W)
80-150+ W 80-115 W 80-115 W 65-115 W 60-80 W 35-55 W 30-50W

One thing to notice here is that Nvidia has dropped the mobile RTX 2080 from the list, as it largely overlaps the new 2070 Super. The mobile RTX 2070 and 2060 remain, however, along with the other Turing GTX GPUs.

Alongside the new GPU SKUs, Nvidia is launching some advancements to its Max-Q technology, with a focus on efficiency. These include a more dynamic sharing of available thermals (a laptop’s ability to dissipate heat created by the CPU and graphics silicon) that the company calls Dynamic Boost. This lets the graphics card consume more power (thus boosting performance) when the full muscle of the CPU isn’t necessary (which often happens during gaming, particularly on CPUs with lots of cores and threads).

Intel and AMD have talked about this as well, as making the most of the available power is crucial in a laptop. AMD's SmartShift technology, which is also in the PlayStation 5 (and possibly Xbox Series X, though we don't have confirmation on that yet), helps to improve overall gaming performance in a similar fashion. For its part, Intel has had various forms of dynamic power allocation for a while, but not at a system level. Intel has hinted that it will be doing more with dynamic power balancing in hardware with its Xe Graphics and Tiger Lake, but it hasn't provided details yet.
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