AMD’s RDNA 3 mobile flagship could be incredibly fast – and matched by Nvidia RTX 4090 laptop GPU?
Next-gen laptop graphics cards are shaping up to be storming performers
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AMD’s next-gen laptopgraphics cardspowered by RDNA 3 could be very fast indeed, according to the latest rumors – and Nvidia’s Lovelace mobile GPUs have also been spotted in a fresh leak, and are supposedly going to be just as quick or thereabouts.
All this comes from a pair of Twitter regulars: firstly Greymon55 delivered a simple tweet (spotted byWccftech) consisting of a laptop icon saying that it’s roughly equal to the RX 6950 XT, meaning that the top RX 7000 notebook GPU will have similar performance levels to that hefty desktop graphics card from AMD.
💻≈6950xtOctober 21, 2022
Kopite7kimi then chimed in on another thread on Twitter – a post revealing the purported next-gen laptop GPU line-up fromNvidia(we’ll come back to that) – saying that the RX 7900M, which is evidently what the leaker believes will be the top dog RDNA 3 mobile GPU (based on the Navi 32 chip, apparently), offers performance in the area of theRTX 3090desktop card.
😮💨Battle with RX 7900M, it has performance like RTX 3090.October 22, 2022
Apply your own seasoning liberally here, of course, but in other words, these leakers are both saying the same thing, as theRX 6950 XTis in the same performance ballpark as the RTX 3090. (In many games, anyway – they trade blows here and there, but the big picture is one of them being very similar overall, at least with rasterization, meaning not considering ray-traced graphics.)
Analysis: Seriously impressive stuff – and the same is true for Nvidia’s next-gen?
If this is true – and that’s a pretty giantif, because this is a big old claim – the RDNA 3 laptop flagship could be something really special. Offering RTX 3090 / RX 6950 XT performance in a gaming notebook early(ish) next year would be a huge leap for those who like to play games on the move; indeed we can’t underestimate how much of a step on such a boost would be. Remember that the current AMD mobile flagship boasts the performance levels of an RX 6700 XT, to put things in perspective.
The other interesting element here is that Nvidia leak – again, keep your skeptical hat very firmly on – showing that Team Green purportedly has an RTX 4090 laptop GPU coming. That’s notable as we didn’t see an RTX 3090 for mobile (just a 3080 Ti), but this flagship GPU won’t use the desktop version’s AD102 graphics chip – that’d just be too hot to handle – it’ll be bumped down to an AD103. But that’ll still offer a big performance boost over the existing flagship 3080 Ti laptop graphics card, of course.
Trying to guess where performance might land in comparison to the rumored RX 7900M is obviously a pretty big ask at this stage, but it’s certainly feasible that anRTX 4090mobile GPU (based on AD103 as noted) could reach RTX 3090 performance levels or close to it. Which is to say the battle of the next-gen laptop flagships from both AMD and Nvidia is likely to be a very close-run thing, and whichever way you dice it, gamers are going to get excellent performance levels from these respective GPUs from Team Green and Team Red.
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Keep your fingers crossed that both of these lines of speculation pan out, then – but at this point, they certainly represent promising signs for the near future of gaming laptops.
Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).
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