Nvidia's launch of the new RTX 5000 Laptop GPUs was and still is a big mess
Expectations are high when a new generation of mobile graphics cards is launched after two years and it took until the end of March (including delays) before Nvidia lifted the review embargo for its new flagship-model RTX 5090 Laptop. Reviews were limited to the Razer Blade 16 initially, even though it did not use the fastest version of the RTX 5090 Laptop, so it was not really the best device to launch the new flagship GPU. The availability of laptops equipped with the RTX 5090 Laptop or the RTX 5080 Laptop only got better in April/May, but not every manufacturer is able to ship corresponding devices as of now.
The availability of test samples is still a big issue. There were absolutely no devices for the review embargo of the RTX 5070 Ti Laptop, even though the situation was slightly better for the regular RTX 5070 Laptop. The new RTX 5060 Laptop, which was just announced at Computex, seems to be a paper launch and we do not expect review devices before June.
The problems with the performance
Nvidia's focus for the RTX 5000 Laptop GPUs are upscaling technologies like DLSS4 and obviously the new multi frame generation. This is all well and good, but we think this is more interesting for weaker graphics cards like the RTX 5060 Laptop. However, if you are paying a huge amount for high-end models, you expect noticeable performance gains without upscaling. Both the RTX 5090 Laptop as well as the RTX 5080 Laptop, however, only offer small performance gains and do not really justify a switch from previous-gen models like the old RTX 4090 Laptop and RTX 4080 Laptop, respectively.
The new RTX 5070 Ti with 12 GB VRAM is the positive exception so far and should have been the successor to the old RTX 4070 Laptop, but the new RTX 5070 Laptop is just slightly faster than the 4070 and still limited to just 8 GB VRAM. This is a major disappointment and not good news for many mainstream gamers. We still have to see how the RTX 5060 Laptop performs, but the RTX 5070 Laptop does not really give us big hopes.
The problems with the drivers
Another big issue right now is the driver situation. Nvidia pretty much releases new driver versions every week or so since the launch, but some of them introduce new issues. Starting with version 567.02, for example, there were issues with the power consumption of the GPUs, because they still drew power after they were active once, even if the were then inactive according to Nvidia's software and other monitoring tools. This obviously affects other measurements as well (power consumption, temperatures).
Some driver versions also resulted in crashes for some current titles and there can be massive performance differences between driver versions, and not just the usual incremental improvements. All in all, this situation is very annoying and it is also a challenge for us reviewers, because you have to check if there are new issues. We cannot really say when the situation goes back to normal, but the two most recent versions 576.28 and 576.40 at least seemed to fix the stability issues. Nvidia just released a new version (576.52) as we finalized this article, which is also available as studio version (which has still been stuck at 576.02 so far).
Nvidia needs a competitor
Overall, the launch of Nvidia's new laptop GPUs is a big mess and we have not experienced anything like this before, neither in terms of bad availability of test samples, nor the ongoing driver issues. The big problem, however, is that Nvidia simply does not have any competition in the mobile space. This means the current mess will probably not have any effects, because the manufacturers simply do not have an alternative and have to use Nvidia GPUs for their new notebooks.
Mobile gamers can only hope that AMD will not only focus on fast iGPU solutions like Strix Halo in the future (even though the availability here is also bad) but also offer high-end GPUs and finally start to compete with Nvidia in this segment.
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