GeForce RTX 4070, 4060, 4050 Laptop Analysis – Nvidia’s new Mainstream Laptop GPUs in Review

Nvidia just launched their new GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop and Geforce RTX 4080 Laptop flagship GPUs in the beginning of February. Our comprehensive analyses showed that the performance was much lower compared to their RTX 40 desktop counterparts due to TGP restrictions, but there is still a major performance improvement over the old flagship model GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop . Both the MSI Titan GT77 (RTX 4090) as well as the Razer Blade 16 (RTX 4080) also showed that both GPUs can easily handle high-re screens including 4K.

However, these laptops are very expensive and the new mainstream GPUs will be more interesting for many customers. Today, Nvidia launches the new models GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop , RTX 4060 Laptop as well as RTX 4050 Laptop , which are available in many gaming and multimedia laptops. In addition to synthetic benchmarks we will check the gaming performance including Ray Tracing and Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling.

The new models GeForce RTX 4070, 4060 and 4050 are all based on the Ada Lovelace architecture and all versions support DLSS 3 as well as raytracing. There are obviously differences in terms of core counts, which is listed in the table below. The RTX 4070 Laptop is based on the AD106 chip, while both the RTX 4060 Laptop and RTX 4050 Laptop are based on the AD107 chip.

All three GPUs can cover a wide range of systems with TGP settings between 35-115 Watts with an additional 25 Watts from the processor via Dynamic Boost. This means all three laptop GPUs can consume up to 140 Watts. However, you will only see this value in synthetic workloads like FurMark, for example.

The power consumption in real gaming scenarios will depend on the actual GPU load, so the consumption can be much lower. This is important when you analyze gaming benchmarks and sensor data, so you do not panic when the GPU does not hit its maximum TGP value all the time since everything works as intended by Nvidia. The wide TGP range can also be an issue for customers when laptop manufacturers do not disclose exact TGP figures for their products.

Our analysis of the RTX 4090/480 laptop showed efficiency improvements of more than 50 %, but Nvidia even advertises higher efficiency gains (3x). The press information now shows the scenario for this claim, which is not very practical. The comparison includes the new RTX 4070 Laptop running at 40W, which will offer the same performance as the old RTX 3070 Laptop .

However, there are no further details on this comparison (like the application, game, settings, etc. ). We already talked about the technical details of the Ada Lovelace architecture in our analysis of the RTX 4090/4080 Laptop .

We are currently still waiting to receive for more information and pictures of the new AD106 and AD107 GPUs from Nvidia and we will update the article as soon as we can. We were able to use multiple systems to collect the following benchmark data. In addition to retail units, we also had access to engineering samples, which will not be sold to customers.

This means there is no review about these systems right now, but we will test their retail counterparts as soon as we can. All laptops were tested with the maximum performance settings and (if possible) deactivated iGPU. The two models RTX 4070 Laptop and RTX 4050 Laptop in the XMG systems as well as the Blade 18 are the fastest versions of the GPUs with the maximum TGP and the results represent the best performance you can achieve.

Gigaybte and MSI use GPUs with a maximum TGP of 105W (80W TGP + 25W Dynamic Boost). We start with synthetic 3DMark benchmarks, where the new RTX 4070 Laptop is right ahead the previous high-end GPU RTX 3080 Ti Laptop and on par with the Desktop RTX 3070 . This also means there is a massive performance deficit compared to the RTX 4080 Laptop , where the most powerful version is about 40 % faster.

The RTX 4070 with 105W in the Gigabyte Aero 16 on the other hand is just 4 % slower. The 105W RTX 4060 Laptop is also just 13 % slower than the RTX 4070 Laptop in the XMG Neo 17 in the synthetic tests, but is also 33 % faster than the old GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop , so it is comparable to the RTX 3070 Ti Laptop overall. The new RTX 4050 shows the biggest improvements with a performance advantage of 74 % over the old RTX 3050 Ti Laptop .

However, we have to be a bit careful here since this is the fastest RTX 4050 Laptop (140W), but most retail units will probably have much lower TGP specifications. Our gaming benchmarks without raytracing and upscaling show a very similar situation compared to the synthetic tests. Overall, the RTX 4070 Laptop is once again very similar to the RTX 3080 Ti Laptop , only 4K settings sometimes show the limitation of the smaller VRAM.

4K gaming is still possible with the RTX 4070 Laptop in almost every modern game. The RTX 4060 Laptop is once again comparable to the RTX 3070 Ti Laptop and is best suited for QHD and also 4K settings in many titles. Our fast version of the RTX 4050 Laptop is on par with the GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop in many gaming benchmarks, which means it is ideal for 1080p gaming and also QHD settings in many titles.

Note: We included tables with more gaming benchmarks at the end of this article. The results shift a bit once you start to use raytracing and the RTX 4070 Laptop is slightly behind the RTX 3080 Ti Laptop. You are basically limited to the 1080p resolution if you want to activate raytracing; 4K settings often suffer from low fps numbers.

The raytracing capabilities of the RTX 4050 are even more limited and even 1080p settings are sometimes too challenging, so you ave to use upscaling to get smooth frame rates (we will cover that in the next section). Note: We will add raytracing benchmarks for the RTX 4060 Laptop shortly. We usually perform our gaming benchmarks without upscaling technologies like Nvidia DLSS or AMD FSR.

However, the performance can benefit a lot when the title supports it and we noticed some major improvements with activated DLSS 3. 0 without any visual deficits. We listed the results for the three new Laptop GPUs in the following tables.

Our OpenGL, OpenCL, and compute benchmarks do not reveal any surprises and the ranking is roughly similar to the synthetic and gaming tests. The consumer models also perform really well in some of the professional SPECviewperf scenarios and can keep up with professional GPUs. We use the Witcher 3 test running with an external screen for our efficiency test, so we can eliminate the influence of the integrated panel.

Witcher 3 is also not very demanding for the processor, so the CPU impact is also very small, We see the new RTX 40 models leading the chart with the RTX 4090 Laptop at top , followed by the new RTX 4060 Laptop. We expect versions of the new GPUs with lower TGP settings will be even better in this regard. The only outlier is the GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop, which is right between previous Ampere GPUs.

This clearly shows that high TGP values do not make much sense for the RTX 4050. There is a noticeable efficiency improvement in general for the new Ada chips compared to previous Ampere GPUs. The comparison between the RTX 4070 Laptop/RTX 3080 Ti Laptop and RTX 4060 Laptop/RTX 3070 Ti laptop shows an efficiency improvement of 23-24 %, which means the advantage of the slower Ada GPUs is lower compared to the high-end models, where we noticed efficiency improvements of up to 53 %.

Our verdict of the new (upper) mainstream GPUs based on the Ada Lovelace architecture is not quite as good as it was on the high-end version. Nvidia was able to improve the performance and the new RTX 4070 Laptop GPU at high TGP values is roughly on par with the old RTX 3080 Ti Laptop. There are some exceptions in 4K titles where the smaller VRAM of the RTX 4070 Laptop has an impact.

The RTX 4060 laptop is comparable to the old RTX 3070 Ti Laptop and the testest RTX 4050 Laptop is similar to a RTX 3060 Laptop or even a little bit faster. More performance for mainstream GPUs: Nvidia’s new RTX 4070 Laptop and RTX 4060 Laptop replace the old GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop and RTX 3070 Ti Laptop, respectively. They offer plenty of performance for QHD panels and even 4K in some games, but the raytracing performance is still limited and you often have to reduce settings or use DLSS upscaling to achieve smooth frame rates.

These are good news, but the efficiency improvements are smaller compared to the high-end models RTX 4090 Laptop/RTX 4080 Laptop. We see an improvement of 23-24 % for the RTX 4070Laptop/RTX 4060 Laptop, but we can also clearly see that the high TGP version of the RTX 4050 Laptop does not make much sense and the efficiency drops to Ampere levels. We simple do not have sufficient data for slower version of the GPU to rate the efficiency.

Nvidia’s announcement with 3x higher efficiency is limited to a very specific scenario according to the press information, so we cannot confirm this statement. The new GeForce RTX 4050 laptop offers the gaming performance of the old GeForce RTX 3060 and is best suited for 1080p displays. The raytracing capabilities, however, are limited.

The biggest issue with the new laptop GPU is the wide TGP range and manufacturers can configure all three GPUs (RTX 4070, RTX 4060 und RTX 4050) between 35-115 Watts or 140W considering up to 25W Dynamic Boost, respectively. It will be extremely important that manufacturer disclose exact TGP figures for their products, otherwise there can be spec sheet heroes that will be disappointing in practice, especially in slim laptops with limited cooling capabilities. We expect that RTX 4070 Laptop and RTX 4060 Laptop will offer very similar performance figures and you can usually save the additional money for the RTX 4070 Laptop, especially on devices with 1080p or QHD screens.

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