Nvidia’s 50-series desktop GPUs have been off to a slightly rocky start, with quality control issues, underwhelming performance gains over last generation, and the occasional melting cable. Its new laptop GPUs, led by the flagship RTX 5090, may be on a similarly modest trajectory, but with one added benefit for laptop gamers: efficiency.

I’ve been testing the RTX 5090 laptop GPU in Razer’s new Blade 16 laptop, which Nvidia is using as a showcase for its top-tier mobile card. My time with it has been more limited than I’d hoped, since my first review unit exhibited some strange graphical anomalies and was prone to blue-screen crashes during basic productivity tasks. Nvidia sent me a replacement, but I’ve had less than two days with it as of press time. From what I’ve seen so far, it is indeed a little faster than the mobile 4090, but like the desktop 50-series cards, its biggest improvements are in DLSS and Multi Frame Generation, rather than raw performance.

The new mobile RTX 5090 has 24GB of GDDR7 VRAM instead of the 16GB of GDDR6 found on the 4090. It’s also got more powerful Tensor cores, slightly more CUDA cores, and an extra hardware video encoder for better …

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