Nvidia unveils GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs for laptops

Nvidia unveiled the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti graphics card using its latest graphics processing unit (GPU) chip. It also showed off laptops with a whole family of 40 Series GPUs.

The 4070 desktop GPU will sell for $800 and will be available on January 5 for custom add-on boards. The Santa Clara, California-based company said the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is faster than the predecessor GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, at nearly half the power, thanks to its new Nvidia Ada Lovelace architecture innovations and Nvidia DLSS 3 (deep learning super sampling) technology.

The GPUs are part of the 40 Series family that the company began introducing last fall, and they will compete against the latest offerings from Advanced Micro Devices’ Radeon GPU family. Nvidia made the announcement at an online event ahead of the CES 2023 tech trade show in Las Vegas.

Nvidia said that the GPUs will be built into more than 170 laptop models. The laptops use the new 4070, 4060 and 4050 GPUs from Nvidia. And 4090- and 4080-based laptops will start shipping for $2,000 on February 8. Other 40 Series RTX laptops (4050/60/70 starting at $1,000) will start shipping on February 22.

Nvidia said the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti will max out a 1440p monitor, delivering over 120 FPS in
modern games like A Plague Tale: Requiem, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, and F1 22. Nvidia showed off a bunch of games that will take advantage of the hardware. Other titles that will use RTX’s ray tracing include Cyberpunk 2077, Portal with RTX, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and many more.

Jeff Fisher, senior vice president of gaming at Nvidia, said in the press event that gaming added 20 million new PC gamers in 2022 and 100 million since 2019. Steam hit a new peak of 32 million, up 16% from 2021, while esports viewing was up 40% from the prior year, he said. He noted Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II hit $800 million in revenues in its opening weekend.

He said the Ada Lovelace architecture launched last fall with the 4090 GPUs represented a “quantum leap in PC gaming,” with more shader cores, RT cores and Tensor cores.

He showed off Witchfire, a new dark fantasy first-person shooter coming soon from The Astronaut for the PC. And he displayed Warhaven, a new PC title coming from Nexon. And he showed off the cool-looking Atomic Heart coming on multiple platforms from Focus Entertainment and 4Divinity.

The GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is targeted at gamers who play at the midrange, or 1440p graphics. The GPU has 7,680 CUDA Cores and 12 GB of super-fast GDDR6X memory.

For users with a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti or GeForce RTX 2080, the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti offers a tremendous
upgrade, Nvidia said. It delivers up to 12 times relative performance over the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

Nvidia DLSS uses AI to figure out the pixels that need to be displayed on a screen, and more than 250 gaming and creative apps use it now. Fifty current and upcoming games are using DLSS 3.0, which doubles the framerate of a game.

“AI will define the future of computing, and this has influenced much of what we’re covering today,” said Fisher. “AI will change gaming forever.”

In addition to running faster than the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti uses 43% less power on average while gaming — just 226 watts, versus the 3090 Ti’s 398 watts. And while idle, web browsing or watching videos, its power usage barely registers thanks to architectural enhancements of the GeForce RTX 40 Series, the company said.

GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs enable live streamers and video editors to use AV1, the next-generation codec. Livestreamers will be able to push higher resolutions and frame rates, with improved quality at the current max bit rates in popular streaming apps and platforms. GeForce RTX 4070 Ti GPUs enable streaming the latest PC games with RTX at up to 4K 60FPS and 1440p 120FPS with AV1 encoding.

AV1 is also enabled in the top video editing apps, including Adobe Premiere Pro (via the Voukoder plugin), DaVinci Resolve, and Jianying (the top video editing app in China). Along with the improved quality that AV1 delivers, GeForce RTX 4070 Ti features dual eight generation Nvidia Encoders, bringing video editors up to two times video export speed.

3D creators will see up to 70% increase in performance compared to the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti in the most popular apps — like Blender, Unity, Unreal Engine and Chaos V-Ray.

Every existing GeForce innovation and enhancement is also available for buyers of GeForce RTX 40 Series graphics cards, including G-SYNC, GeForce Experience one-click overclocking and game optimization, Shadowplay recording, and so much more.

Starting on January 5, GeForce RTX 4070 Ti for desktops will be available from top add-in card providers Asus, Colorful, Gainward, Galax, Gigabyte, INNO3D, KFA2, MSI, Palit, PNY and Zotac, as well as from gaming system integrators and builders worldwide.

The new GeForce RTX 40 Series laptops are up to three times more power efficient than the previous
generation and bring the Ada architecture, Nvidia DLSS 3 and fifth-generation Max-Q technologies to laptops for the first time.

For gamers, RTX 40 Series laptops deliver up to four times the performance in triple-A games like full ray-traced Cyberpunk 2077 with new RT Overdrive Mode, the company said.

“With the Ada architecture, we set out to transform the performance and power efficiency of gaming and creator laptops,” said Fisher. “The new RTX 40 Series delivers enthusiast-class performance in laptops as slim as 14 inches, a new milestone.”

RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 laptops

The Ada architecture has also enabled a new class of enthusiast laptops that are the world’s fastest, the company said. Gamers can play on three 4K monitors for surround gaming at 60 frames per second —
enough to power a professional-grade driving simulator.

RTX 40 Series flagship laptops (4080 and 4090) start at $2,000 and will be available beginning Feb. 8.

RTX 4070, 4060, 4050 laptops

The new RTX 4070, 4060 and 4050 laptops are faster than the previous-generation flagship model, using as little as one-third the GPU power. They deliver 80 fps, 1440p gaming and transform creation processes like rendering scenes in Blender, which used to take two and a half hours, to just 10 minutes.

The RTX 4050 laptops start at $1,000 and will be available beginning Feb. 22.

Fifth-Generation Max-Q Technologies improve laptop efficiency

With each new GPU generation since 2017, advancements in Max-Q technology have improved
laptop design. Today, alongside the launch of the GeForce RTX 40 Series laptops, Nvidia is introducing its fifth-generation Max-Q technologies, which radically enhance efficiency and accelerate gaming performance using the following upgrades:

• Nvidia DLSS 3 has been optimized for laptops and built into Max-Q technologies, including Whispermode and BatteryBoost, which improve performance, acoustics and battery life by up to two times.
• The lowest voltage GDDR6 memory ever, shipped in partnership with multiple manufacturers.
• Tri-speed memory control enables the GPU to switch to newer, lower-power memory states dynamically.
• Ada’s on-chip memory has been optimized for Max-Q, doubling the bandwidth, increasing the size by 16 times and improving clock gating.

14-Inch laptops more powerful

Before the introduction of the Ada architecture, 95% of this fastest-growing laptop segment was limited to basic tasks and apps, Nvidia said. More than 13 million were sold last year, Fisher said.

Now the company said 14-inch laptops can take on tasks that were previously impossible, such as fast 3D rendering in Blender and cutting-edge AI tools in popular apps like Adobe Photoshop or Premiere Pro.

The 14-inch laptops are also gaming powerhouses, up to twice as fast as a PlayStation 5 but one-sixth the size. Gamers can play graphically intense triple-A games, like Cyberpunk 2077, with ray tracing and DLSS.

Purpose-built for 110 million creators

The creator market continues to grow rapidly, surpassing more than 110 million professional and hobbyist PC creators. And 3D creation on Nvidia hardware, specifically, grew 42% since last year, the company said.

GeForce RTX laptop users can benefit from Nvidia Studio accelerations in over 110 of the most popular creative apps — plus exclusive access to AI-powered apps like Nvidia Omniverse, Canvas and Broadcast. 3D artists can collaborate with one another in Omniverse from anywhere in the world, while video editors can produce on location faster with AI tools and cut export times in half with dual encoders.

“Creating has grown beyond photos and videos to virtual worlds rendered with 3D cinematic graphics and true-to-life physics,” Fisher said. “The RTX platform is powering this growth.”

Stephanie Johnson, vice president of studio and gaming at Nvidia, said in a press briefing that AI is transforming the work of the 110 million creators in the market, and Nvidia Studio has 110 apps that make life easier for those creators. Nvidia enabled the mod Portal Prelude for its RTX Remix, tool.

“The modding community can’t wait to get their hands on Remix,” Johnson said.

She said 90% of internet videos run at 1080p or lower, but half of RTX users have higher resolution monitors. RTX video super-resolution can remove blocky compression and upscale video resolution, starting this February with 30 Series and 40 Series GPUs.

GeForce RTX 40 Series flagship laptops will be available starting Feb. 8 from the world’s top manufacturers, including Acer, Alienware, Asus, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, Lenovo, MSI, Razer and Samsung. They will also be available from local makers and system builders, including CyberPower PC, Eluktronics, Hasee, PC Specialist 3XS by Scan and Schenker, with more coming in Q1.