The RTX 4090 laptop GPU will undoubtedly be the most powerful graphics cards available in the next laptop generation. We’ll update this page as soon as we learn more about these upcoming laptops. And, once the first review copies are available, we’ll convert this page into a guide to the best RTX 4090 Laptops to assist you in selecting the best laptop for your needs.
Nvidia announced pricing for the upcoming RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 laptops on February 8th, with prices starting at $2,000 — implying that most high-end models could cost significantly more.
Given the high prices of the desktop versions of those two graphics cards, many were sceptical and hoped for the worst. These predictions appear to be coming true.
There has been some discussion about whether an RTX 4090 laptop graphics card is even necessary. The reason we never saw an RTX 3090 laptop was because the power draw of this high-end card was deemed too high to warrant making a laptop version of.
Upgrading to an RTX 4070 costs $400 more, while upgrading to an RTX 4080 costs $1,127 more. Finally, if you want the top configuration with Nvidia’s RTX 4090, you’ll have to pay an extra 1,687 euros.
RTX 4090 laptops vs RTX 4090 desktop
The RTX 4090 desktop is significantly more powerful than the RTX 4090 laptop. To some extent, this is true of all Laptop graphics cards in comparison to their desktop counterparts, but the difference in this case is quite significant: CUDA cores, boost clock, power limit, memory size, and memory interface/bus are all much greater on the desktop variant, to the point where it’s debatable whether they should even be given the same name. In this case, it appears that Nvidia has simply given the moniker ‘4090’ to their most powerful laptop graphics card, regardless of any technical similarities.
It’s worth noting that much of this outperformance can be attributed to the newer GPUs’ support for DLSS 3. We’ve only seen results from Jarrod comparing DLSS-ready games with the feature enabled, at least directly between an RTX 4090 laptop and an RTX 3080 Ti laptop.
The RTX 4090 laptop variant uses the AD103 GPU rather than the AD102 GPU found in the desktop RTX 4090. For those who are unaware, a properly defined ‘GPU’ is the brain of the graphics card, which it frequently is. Used as abbreviation for the entire graphics card.
