While the first Nvidia RTX 50-series GPUs are now with us in the form of mighty (and perhaps melty?) graphics cards, some of us have been looking towards mobile versions of the GPUs for our slice of the Blackwell pie. We've been waiting until a March launch for RTX 50-series laptops, and now Nvidia has confirmed that pre-orders will start from February 25.
In an X post from the official Nvidia GeForce account, Nvidia says: "GeForce RTX 50 Series Laptop pre-orders start Feb 25 from OEMs. 👀 Stay tuned for more details!" And Nvidia's 50-series laptops webpage confirms that these laptops will be "available starting March 2025," so it shouldn't be long until those pre-orders arrive, if you're lucky enough to grab one.
"👀" indeed. While we can't know for certain until we test them out ourselves, this next generation of laptops is expected to offer quite a lot for gamers, primarily because of DLSS 4's Multi Frame Generation. Based on what we've seen of the desktop RTX 5080 and RTX 5090, RTX 50-series GPUs might not offer massive leaps in pure raster performance, but they more than make up for this with AI-aided frame generation.
Of course, how you feel about this will depend on whether you think of them as 'fake frames' or real ones—but hey, I'll take an extra 100 frames over zero, fake or not.
This is simplifying things, of course, because there's also the question of latency, which will be more pronounced in the case of less powerful laptop GPUs than in the desktop ones (the RTX 5070 Ti mobile, for instance, will feature a GB205 GPU, the same as will be in the desktop RTX 5070). That's because if you start with lower input frame rates you end up with more latency from subsequent generated frames.
Still, these higher-end chips should still be powerful, even if a little less powerful than their desktop counterparts, so we shouldn't be talking atrocious frame rates before Multi Frame Generation kicks in.
And it is the upper end of the 50-series GPU lineup we're expecting to kick off with: RTX 5090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5070 Ti. These were some of the first RTX 50-series gaming laptops we saw at retailers. RTX 5070 laptops, on the other hand, are expected to launch later, in April. This follows Nvidia's usual GPU release cadence—higher-end first, lower-end later—and it matches what we're seeing on the desktop graphics card front.
These laptops should all come packaged with Intel Core Ultra 200H-series (Arrow Lake) or AMD Ryzen AI 300 (Strix Point) processors, too, which will firmly plant us in the current generation.
Although we can't be certain whether the current retailer listing prices will stick, and a lot of the currently listed RTX 50-series laptops are mega expensive, at least some of them seem reasonable. Take the ROG Strix G16 with RTX 5070 Ti for $1,900 at Best Buy, for instance, or a 16-inch MSI laptop with RTX 5070 Ti for $1,599 at Newegg. Though of course, even if these do remain as affordable, whether they'll remain in stock for more than a nanosecond is another question entirely.
Plenty to hesitantly look forward to, then. With more Nvidia desktop GPUs set to launch soon and AMD ones just around the corner, too, it'll be interesting to see which garners the most attention.
