GeForce RTX 5090 laptops perform almost identically to a desktop RTX 4070 Ti Super

Major manufacturers like Razer and HP have begun shipping their latest respective gaming laptops equipped with GeForce RTX 5090 graphics. While performance is a decent step above the mobile RTX 4090, the gap between it and the desktop RTX 5090 is significant and arguably wider than the gap between the mobile RTX 4090 and desktop RTX 4090. The mobile RTX 5090 is therefore more comparable to the desktop RTX 4070 Ti Super based on our benchmark tests across multiple samples as shown by the graphs below. 3DMark results would be within single-digit percentage points between the two GPUs.

The results are somewhat disappointing considering that the mobile RTX 5090 integrates more unified shaders, more TMUs, more ROPs, more RT cores, and more tensor cores than even the desktop RTX 4070 Ti Super. The real killer in this scenario is the significantly lower TGP of the mobile chip meaning GPU clock rates are around half of the aforementioned desktop chips. Theoretical performance level is therefore only in the low 30 TFLOPS range compared to ~40 TFLOPS on the desktop RTX 4070 Ti.

There is nonetheless a bright spot for the mobile RTX 5090 when running actual games instead of synthetic 3DMark benchmarks. Demanding games like Final Fantasy 15, Cyberpunk 2077, Black Myth: Wukong, and Alan Wake 2 on 4K maximum settings would perform similarly to a desktop RTX 4070 Ti Super despite their massive TGP differences according to our analyses. This doesn't even account for any DLSS4 or MFG features which would increase the performance gap in favor of the mobile RTX 5090. Thus, laptop owners can at least bank on the superior performance-per-watt with the mobile RTX 5090 even though its raw performance is more akin to a last generation desktop part.