Nvidia RTX 5090 mobile tested: The needle hasn’t moved on performance but this is the first time I’d consider ditching my desktop for a gaming laptop

Nvidia has released the largest part of its RTX Blackwell desktop graphics card range now, and so, isn’t it about time we had a swell of brand new gaming laptops replete with new RTX 50-series mobile chips? I think so, too, and so does Nvidia, which is why we’re about to see a glut of new notebooks with shiny new GPUs and Intel and AMD’s latest CPUs.

Though I think it’s fair to say this year’s launch of the RTX Blackwell architecture has been a mixed success. Though that mix is heavily weighted on the side of the outright failures of the new GPU launches.

On the one hand, we’ve got a super-efficient GPU architecture that’s bringing neural shaders to consumer GPUs for the first time, and offers ludicrous frame rates in Multi Frame Generation-compatible games. But on the other we’ve had more reports in this generation of melting cables, blackscreen issues, crashing PCs, incomplete GPUs missing ROPs, and that’s before mentioning the ephemeral MSRPs, frankly offensive retail pricing, and a dearth of GPU stock in the wild.

Here’s hoping the launch of the mobile versions of the RTX 50-series chips is more successful. By rights, it ought to be—there are no cables or adapters to mess around with and the GPUs are built into existing systems that will have been through (hopefully) rigorous stability testing. So it should all just work together from the get-go and not have to find a fit within existing gaming PCs with myriad specs, and different generations of mixed and matched hardware.

What the mobile side of things can’t necessarily deal with are pricing and stock issues and, while Nvidia has given out an MSRP of sorts for notebooks featuring its different chips, there will undoubtedly be a new generation tax tacked onto the gaming laptops getting released this month.

But will they be as egregious as the desktop add-in card market? An RTX 5090 laptop isn’t going to be cheap, but laptop manufacturers have a certain set of price points that they rarely step away from, at least outside of sale times.

So, what makes the mobile version of the RTX Blackwell tech tick, where does it differ, and how does it compare to the previous generation? Well, it’s going to be an interesting one, because in terms of raw performance not a lot has really changed, but in terms of the actual experience, it’s so much better than Ada.

RTX Blackwell mobile: architecture

At its heart we are effectively talking about the same GPU architecture as has fitted into the desktop graphics cards we’ve already seen. That means essentially a graphics architecture which is more or less a refinement of the Ada Lovelace architecture from the RTX 40-series GPUs, but with some extra features to bolster the Neural Rendering era that we’re now living in.

But there are some things—parts of the design which existed in the desktop chips—that are more relevant for the mobile parts. Efficiency is the absolute most important thing for any kind of mobile chip, and most especially for a discrete laptop graphics card which will take up the lion’s share of any system power budget. So, that’s where I’m going to start first.

Nvidia calls it Advanced Power Gating, and it’s something that features in the desktop GPUs, too. It essentially allows for individual parts of the chip to just have a sleep if they’re not being used, giving incredibly fine grain power control across the entire GPU. It’s also able to shut these parts down very quickly, too, so where an idle time would traditionally have been so short as to otherwise be considered active, RTX Blackwell is able to quickly shut those down.

It’s not just around the GPU core itself, either, Nvidia has leaned into the memory system to drive power saving, too. There are separate power rails for both the GPU and the memory within RTX Blackwell, which gives more independent voltage control across the entirety of the chip and means sections of the GPU can be shut down even for very short periods of idle time.

Another feature of the desktop GPUs which makes more sense in the mobile iteration is the speed at which RTX Blackwell can switch between clock frequencies. Nvidia claims that this switching is some 1000x faster with the new architecture, though honestly, that’s not something I can honestly verify. It says this speed of adjustment allows full granularity of clock speed throughout a game frame’s creation, rather than being locked at a certain level for the duration.

Now, that frame time may be less than 10 ms, but in that time many different parts of the GPU are being used to create the final image, especially in these AI-accelerated times of ours. It should mean each part of the GPU can perform at its fullest, but also at its most efficient, hopefully saving you power while gaming on battery.

To aid that, Nvidia has made some changes to its BatteryBoost technology. Where once it was limited to 30 fps, it now uses in-game settings optimised via the Nvidia App with the aim of hitting 60 fps on battery. It also has a “scene-aware algorithm” that will lower this fps target to 30 frames per second in “scenes of low action”, with the examples given of looking at map screens, dialogue screens, or skill trees. Though for players of Football Manager, such as I, it does currently seem to think the entire game is a scene of low action…

Those are the key technical features for laptops, but I would also add in that the expansion of Nvidia’s Frame Generation to Multi Frame Generation can also make a significant impact on gaming on a laptop, especially for a high-end card, such as the RTX 5090. It’s the main sell right now for the desktop RTX 50-series, and looking at the performance delta between Ada and Blackwell chips on mobile, that’s going to be even more the case when it comes to frame rates with laptops.

But, by way of a refresher… this is exactly what it says on the box, it’s frame gen with multiple frames, up to 4x the traditionally rendered frames. But it’s a little more complicated than just the Lossless Scaling version of MFG; the addition of enhanced Flip Metering hardware in the display engine of RTX Blackwell cards gives it twice the pixel processing capabilities and pulls the load away from the CPU in terms of ordering up those extra frames in a smooth manner.

Yes, it’s still interpolation—the card is rendering two frames and then jamming in up to three extra frames in-between—but it’s using a new AI model instead of the optical flow hardware of the RTX 40-series. This is what allows it to do the frame gen dance up to 40% faster (hence being able to create those extra frames) and with a 30% reduction on the VRAM demands of the feature.

The 5th Gen Tensor Cores have also been given more power to deal with the added load of MFG and the DLSS Transformer models (replacing the older Convolutional Neural Network method), and the AI Management Processor also added into the silicon mix means that this architecture is able to deal with extra AI processing expected to be part of graphics pipelines over the next few years.

And that is expected to be the future of game graphics, which is why the programmable shaders of the RTX Blackwell architecture are now called Neural Shaders. These essentially now have far more direct access to the Tensor Cores of a chip, without having to go via CUDA to get to them, and should give developers access to a whole heap of new toys, such as Mega Geometry, Neural Materials, and Neural Radiance Cache. That last is playable in the HL2: Remix demo, but for a more detailed rundown of these future technologies before they appear in any game we can stick in our laptops, our Nick’s checked out the Zorah demo in detail over at GDC.

RTX Blackwell mobile: specs

As you would expect the mobile and desktop GPUs don’t 100% translate between each platform. There is no GB202 mobile chip—last seen in the RTX 5090 desktop card—so the top mobile card is using the same GB203 GPU as the desktop RTX 5080. Though this mobile RTX 5090 actually has fewer CUDA cores than its desktop equivalent that uses the same essential GPU. Given this is a 150 W chip versus a 360 W desktop GPU, however, I think that’s probably fair.

It is, however, a more powerful chip than the old RTX 4090 at least, with another six SMs worth of CUDA cores to call on (and therefore more Tensor and RT Cores, too). Thanks to the GDDR7 memory it also has a ton more memory bandwidth across its 256-bit bus. We’re looking at 576 GB/s for the RTX 4090 and 896 GB/s for the RTX 5090, a 56% increase. It also has a lot more raw VRAM to call on, too, with a full 24 GB, the largest capacity of any consumer laptop GPU.

The RTX 5080 then gets its own VRAM bump, up to 16 GB from the 12 GB of the RTX 4080 mobile, and keeps the same 256-bit bus as the RTX 5090. Though it is only a modest upgrade in terms of CUDA core count, with only another 2 SMs worth of cores added to the mix.

The RTX 5070 Ti has no direct match from the previous generation, and it honestly feels a lot like Nvidia could have made a bit of a stir by designating it the straight RTX 5070, giving it almost parity with the desktop RTX 5070. That would have felt like a tangible mid-range upgrade for the volume sector of the market and a real generational boost.

But no, it’s the RTX 5070 Ti, has fewer cores than the desktop RTX 5070 (not a positively reviewed GPU) and comes with 12 GB of GDDR7 on a 192-bit bus. That leaves the mobile RTX 5070 chip looking for all the world like it really should have been the new RTX 5060 GPU, and leaving us all feeling a little sad that AMD isn’t prepared to drop RDNA 4 GPUs into the laptop market to give us some much-needed competition here, too.

RTX Blackwell mobile: performance

I’ve only got the RTX 5090 mobile chip to play with today and it paints a very similar picture to the previous generation in terms of performance. Given that similar performance, unless something catastrophic happens with the RTX 5080 frame rates, yet again, it’s possible that the lower-spec Nvidia GPU might perform at the same levels as the more constrained RTX 5090.

It is a beefy GPU, and in the Razer laptop I’ve been testing it in, it’s obviously not running to the same performance levels as you will see the RTX 5090 hitting in larger laptops and with something like the upcoming AMD X3D mobile CPUs.

The similarity in performance was something I castigated the mobile Ada lineup for in the past generation—after all, why are you paying top dollar for the high-end laptop GPU when the next tier down is often just as capable.

Without having spent the past few weeks messing around with this seriously impressive gaming laptop, I understand this is going to be hard for a lot of people to hear: with this generation of GPUs it’s the gaming experience which is really the big differentiator between the Blackwell and Ada lineups, not the overall performance.

Frame rates, honestly, have been largely the same across the RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 gaming laptops I’ve been testing against each other. There may be more of a difference in other machines with an RTX 5090 inside it, because the Lenovo Legion 9 comes with a higher power Intel CPU that really makes a difference in some games, and especially at the 1080p level.

But essentially, the creator, AI, and Multi Frame Gen performance aside, Nvidia hasn’t really moved the needle in terms of the sort of frame rates you can expect from its top mobile chips, and that’s likely to cause a certain level of consternation and accusations of sand-baggery.

The difference, however, is that I would actually enjoy using the RTX 5090 as my main machine.

I’ve been using the RTX 4090-powered Lenovo as my mobile FC25 machine, when I head around my friend’s place for an evening of virtual coop kickball. But while it’s more than capable of driving high frame rates on a 4K OLED TV, the sound it kicks out is abhorrent. The noise and fan levels necessary to have an RTX 4090 running at the same level as the RTX 5090 is a distraction at best and an aural assault at worst.

With the RTX 5090, however, it’s far more restrained. Don’t get me wrong, the fan noise is still noticeable, but it’s nowhere near the same level. And the other thing is that such is the latent performance in the RTX Blackwell chip I was happily running the Blade 16 in Silent mode (where it is much, much quieter even if it’s not exactly silent) and still getting great gaming performance out of it.

Which is also where Multi Frame Gen really makes a difference on the laptop scene. On your desktop you can throw MFG on an RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 and marvel at ludicrous triple-figure frame rates. But on the laptop side, you can use that extra frame rate legroom, dial back your system settings to chill out the cooling or even the battery power drain, and still be gaming at excellent average fps levels without the commonly sonically offensive fan-based jump scares.

Ah yes, I mentioned battery drain, didn’t I. This is the first gaming laptop I’ve used that I have been happily gaming on without it plugged into the mains. And not just for some 40 minutes. That sounds like an exaggeration, but the RTX 4090 Lenovo literally will only run for 41 minutes when gaming if you’re not attached to a socket. The Blade 16 here, with a slightly smaller battery, will go on for over two hours.

And it’s not the rubbish experience laptop gaming has traditionally been on battery, either.

RTX Blackwell mobile: gaming on battery

This is actually a thing with RTX Blackwell, something that honestly wasn’t really possible with older gaming laptop cards.

With the Blade 16 and its 90 Whr battery the battery performance is markedly different. I’m seeing well over two hours of game time out of the PCMark 10 gaming battery life test, which tallies perfectly with Nvidia’s claims of 40% better battery life. My previous Blade 16 test runs, with an RTX 4090 inside it, managed just over 90 minutes with a 99 Whr battery, and all told is over a 43% improvement.

All of the efficiency improvements have absolutely borne fruit when it comes to getting legitimate gaming time away from a power source. And it’s not just a case of the BatteryBoost feature cratering a game’s graphics settings to lighten the load—even with BatteryBoost disabled I’m still seeing long levels of battery life.

Though, if you let it, the feature will absolutely destroy the in-game settings should you optimise them via the Nvidia App. For me, it’s too aggressive, but it’s not something you need to follow religiously. You still get the scene-aware algo which will drop perf down to 30 fps in non-action oriented scenes. It was clear playing Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 for a while on battery that it was accurately detecting the dialogue and inventory screens, quickly dropping to 30 fps in those scenes and just as quickly going back up to 60 fps.

Though it’s not perfect, certainly not for me, a Football Manager obsessive. I need my laptop to be able to run FM happily on battery for a good long while, something most gaming laptops aren’t equipped to do. But I can’t run with BatteryBoost enabled with the RTX 5090, however, as even in the match highlights, it doesn’t deem anything on-screen to be action-y enough to warrant the 60 fps treatment, constantly restricting me to 30 fps no matter what.

Luckily the Blade 16 has a decent integrated GPU so I could entirely shut the RTX 5090 down when I’m continuing my current long-term FM save.

Still, I am seriously impressed with the battery life and gaming experience when playing away from the plug. This is the first gaming laptop—especially high-performance one—that actually delivers on the promise of truly mobile gaming for an extended period of time. Sure, it ain’t going to get you across the Atlantic on a flight, but neither will playing KCD2 on your ROG Ally X, either.

RTX Blackwell mobile: verdict

I can certainly see there being a rather negative response to the launch of Nvidia’s new gaming laptop GPUs. There was certainly consternation on the desktop side of the equation where gen-on-gen performance was only moderately ahead of the previous chips, but on the mobile side it looks like all you have to call on for higher frame rates now is MFG. And only then when it’s available in the game you want to play.

If we were judging purely on frame rates alone that would make the RTX Blackwell generation a bit of a bust.

But more than on desktop, gaming on a laptop is about the actual experience of using it as a device than the raw frame per second count. And this is where the extra efficiency of RTX Blackwell comes in, allowing for the same level of performance, but without the brutal aural assault of excessive fan noise. No longer will we have to recommend a good gaming headset alongside your gaming laptop purchase.

And gaming on a battery is truly a thing now, as is using something like the Blade with an RTX 5090 inside it as your daily driver. It can come in a svelte chassis and still deliver long battery life whether gaming or just doing your daily work away from a plug.

It really is the first gaming laptop I’ve seen that would actually have me consider dropping my desktop. Plugged into a monitor and it’s a great gaming machine, away from the plug it’s a stellar laptop setup.

Well, it would be if it wasn’t for pricing. The pricing of RTX 5090 laptops is likely to remain around the $4,000 mark for a long while—especially for one with the style of the Blade—despite the claims of Nvidia around $2,900 starting prices for RTX 5090 notebooks. In the end that sort of money would still have me running to see what sort of desktop rig I could build, but if you’re after a top-end laptop that can do everything from creative work, to daily work, to gaming fun times, this generation is going to deliver.