GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop becomes best mobile GPU on PassMark despite GPU Compute obstacle
A GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU has appeared in PassMark’s G3D Mark performance chart for high-end video cards, where its current score of 28,280 has it placed above the RTX 4090 Laptop GPU. This means the Blackwell chip is now the best-performing mobile GPU on the site so far, with only a single sample being recorded at the time of writing. The RTX 5090 Laptop GPU, with its TDP of 95-150 W, sits just above an AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT desktop graphics card (released in 2022) and a little below the Radeon PRO W7800 desktop graphics card (launched in 2023) in the latest chart.
Depending on where your GPU brand loyalties lie, this is either a strong result or a poor result. Those who think the former will be pleased that Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU is the best mobile GPU on the benchmark and managed to do so at much lower TDPs than desktop cards, but those who think the latter will point out the age of the desktop cards it is outscoring and the low difference between the RTX 5090 Laptop and RTX 4090 Laptop (just +2.79%). But in this case, the grass is greener on the other side of the fence in regard to going from an Ada Lovelace GPU to a Blackwell one.
For a start, the RTX 5090 Laptop GPU comes with 24 GB of GDDR7 memory (4090 Laptop: 16 GB GDDR6), and it has 10,496 CUDA cores compared to the predecessor’s count of 9,728 cores. The newer RTX 50-series mobile GPUs should be more efficient in processing too, thanks to new Max-Q technologies that bring numerous optimizations. But with all this extra GPU bling, it can be questioned why the RTX 5090 Laptop GPU is only +2.79% ahead of the RTX 4090 Laptop GPU (as found in the Alienware M18 R2, available on Amazon) in the main performance chart and even stuck at RTX 4060 Laptop GPU levels in PassMark’s GPU Compute test.
The answer is likely due to compatibility issues. As we already reported, PassMark has discovered that suspiciously mediocre performances from RTX 50-series cards on that particular benchmark have been caused by Nvidia ceasing support for 32-bit frameworks. The site is in the process of producing a patch so that SKUs from Team Green get a fairer representation in the benchmarks offered. As can be seen in the comparison below, the RTX 5090 Laptop GPU naturally blows the RTX 4060 Laptop GPU out of the water in the DirectX 9-12 tests, but it is somehow only level in GPU Compute. Either way, this is a promising start for Nvidia’s top-end mobile chip, if it can still claim a high benchmark result even in a compromised state.
