Nvidia has added two entry-level GPUs, the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti and RTX 3050, to its RTX 30 laptop line. Nvidia says the chips will be available “this summer” in laptops starting at $799.
Like every other product in the RTX 30 line, these cards are based on the Ampere architecture and are capable of ray tracing and Nvidia’s proprietary “Deep Learning Super Sampling” (DLSS) upscaling technology. As you can probably guess from their names, the cards fit under the existing RTX 3060 GPU, with cuts across the board. You can dive into Nvidia’s comparison chart below, but the short cut is that these cheaper GPUs have less memory (4GB) and fewer CUDA, Tensor, and ray-tracing cores.
Nvidia’s comparison of its laptop GPU lineup.
Nvidia
DLSS allows your GPU to render a game at a lower resolution and then use AI to upscale everything to a higher resolution, giving you a higher frame rate than you could with your native resolution. It sounds like AI hocus-pocus, but it really works: you just need the right Nvidia card and a game that supports it. On a lower-powered laptop, anything that improves gaming performance without sacrificing graphics fidelity is welcome.
Intel’s Tiger Lake-H processors were also announced today, and we should see many devices launching with both chips. that is if there is ample supply of the chips to go around. Nvidia is already struggling with serious shortages of video cards and Intel is also being hit by the worldwide chip shortage. Maybe partner laptops get a higher chip allocation?