Nvidia driver 528.49 is borked on the Blade 18 RTX 4070, Razer says a fix should be coming soon

After having reviewed the Razer Blade 16 with no major issues, we had anticipated the Blade 18 to be smooth sailing from start to finish. Unfortunately, that couldn't be further from the truth as we experienced notable problems on our specific Blade 18 RTX 4070 test unit. Most concerning are the lack of G-Sync support and the performance issues when enabling DLSS 3 or frame generation on an external monitor. After having reached out to Razer, the manufacturer has confirmed that our issues are repeatable on a second Blade 18 RTX 4070 unit running on Nvidia 528.49.

A fix from Nvidia is on the way according to Razer, but no time window has been provided. We also can't yet confirm if the issue is specific to the Blade 18 RTX 4070 or if the entire lineup is affected. This page and our review page will be updated once the driver update lands. For now, however, we recommend staying on an earlier driver and not updating to 528.49 if you're a Blade 18 owner.

The Blade 18 is otherwise an excellent model with its large 18-inch screen wrapped in a 17-inch form factor. It's lighter and noticeably smaller than the competing Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 while offering similar CPU and GPU options up to the RTX 4090. Here's hoping that its GPU issues will be solved sooner rather than later.

(March 3, 2023 update: Razer has confirmed that a BIOS 2.02 update will address the missing G-Sync issue. We can confirm that the update works as intended.

The screen flickering issue will also be fixed via a driver update in the near future.

As for the DLSS 3 issue on external monitors, the problem persists on our unit and Razer is investigating the cause. We will update this page again when we have more information.)