Best graphics card for laptops in 2024: the mobile GPUs I’d want in my next gaming laptop

For us PC gamers, the most important part of a gaming notebook is its GPU. Knowing what the best graphics card for laptops is could be the key that stops you from either spending too much on a machine that fails to perform or buying a gaming laptop without the necessary grunt to deliver the frame rates you crave.

But just being confident about the specific graphics chip inside is sadly no longer enough—you now need to know how much power the manufacturers are letting that GPU chow down on. And it’s not always easy to tell, with some of the best gaming laptop builders either hiding those stats behind reams of online documentation, or just obfuscating the issue with vague allusions and no direct info.

Suffice to say, each individual GPU has a range of potential power configurations, allowing manufacturers to drop powerful graphics silicon into the slightest of builds. Just know that even if your thin little gaming laptop is rocking an RTX 4090 it might still get outperformed by a significantly cheaper RTX 4080. And it’s for that reason, for us, the best graphics card for laptops is Nvidia’s RTX 4080. It can outperform an RTX 4090 at times, and won’t necessarily break your bank account wide open to do it.

And, as prices have dropped, the RTX 4060 has become our pick as the best budget GPU for gaming laptops, because it can make sub-$1,000 notebooks shine at 1080p. Just be careful about what wattage version is in whatever laptop you end up choosing.

Curated by…

Curated by…

Dave James

In his two decades as a technology journalist and PC gaming tech aficionado, Dave has reviewed, tested, and broken more laptops than any normal human should. He has been formulating benchmarking criteria and testing methodology since he was struggling to form even a facsimile of a beard, and has put pretty much every generation of graphics chip—in both desktop and mobile form—through their paces. He’s personally run systems with all the chips recommended in this guide, and is speaking from a whole lot of experience.

The quick list

Best graphics card for laptops

The best graphics card for laptops is the mobile Nvidia RTX 4080. It packs a great mix of gaming performance and efficiency, all built out of the excellent Ada Lovelace GPU architecture. The RTX 4090 might be the most powerful GPU of this generation, but it’s a big, hot, power-hungry slice of graphics silicon that will make demands of mobile cooling that most laptops cannot contend with.

The RTX 4080, however, can be tuned to deliver gaming performance that is sometimes capable of beating an overheating RTX 4090 jammed into the same chassis. When I first started testing this generation of GPUs this realisation led me to question why exactly anyone would pick an RTX 4090 laptop, though I’ve softened a little having toyed with the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17, but that would be the super high-end choice only.

In straight technical terms, the RTX 4080 in laptop form sits somewhere between the desktop versions of the RTX 4070 Super and RTX 4070 Ti. It uses the same GPU, but has a CUDA core count that’s slap bang in the middle of the two. That means it also comes with 12 GB of GDDR6 (not the more power-hungry GDDR6X), so if you were hoping the RTX 4080 mobile would be the same as the ~$1,000 desktop RTX 4080 I’m afraid you’re going to be mildly disappointed.

But when it comes to gaming on a laptop’s 1080p, 1440p, or 1600p display you’re going to be treated to a great experience. The RTX 4080 GPU is more than capable of delivering at those resolutions, often even without upscaling—now almost a requisite of modern games. And when you add in both DLSS3 and the weird magic of Frame Generation, you’re going to see slick gaming frame rates in the top titles with this graphics silicon built into your laptop.

It will still wind up those laptop fans, however, and if you put your machine into full performance mode you are definitely going to want to don a good gaming headset to keep your sanity and your ears intact. Such is the way with gaming laptops…

There are a variety of different TDPs you’ll see with RTX 4080 gaming laptops, but we’ve tested at 150 W and 175 W and would happily recommend machines running at either of those levels. 

Our Nvidia RTX 4080 gaming laptop reviews:

Best budget graphics card for laptops

If you’re after a good, affordable 1080p gaming laptop then you’re going to be looking at the lower end of Nvidia’s GPU stack. And, for us, the best graphics card for budget laptops is the RTX 4060. In all honesty, at some levels there isn’t a lot between that and the lower spec RTX 4050—so when you’re getting down to the lower echelons of the possible TDP configurations of the RTX 4060 I would suggest thinking twice about pulling the trigger—but so long as you’re looking at 65 W or above it’s a great GPU.

You should be looking at well below the $1,000 mark for an RTX 4060 gaming laptop, and that will deliver a 1080p machine that’s able to bring the twin barrels of DLSS3 and Frame Generation to bear on the latest games, giving excellent frame rates for the money.

It’s also our pick over the RTX 4050 right now as—despite performance sometimes being very close and some cheap laptops rolling around with the lowest tier Nvidia GPU—that extra little bit of VRAM does make a difference. And that will likely make more of a difference throughout the lifetime of your laptop, too.

You also get more of the ray tracing good stuff when it comes to the relative GPU hardware, and that means any more demanding modern game is going to be far more comfortable and performant running on the RTX 4060 than the RTX 4050, no matter how close their standard raster performance is.

The RTX 4060 is a bit of an anomaly in the Ada generation, in that both the mobile and desktop versions of the GPU share the same silicon. The AD107 in the RTX 4060 mobile is more or less the same as the AD107 in the desktop graphics card. There are the same 3072 CUDA cores, and the same 8 GB of GDDR6 on a 128-bit bus, but there are a couple of anomalies between them all the same. The mobile chip has more L2 cache, but fewer render output units (ROPs), though overall the two chips are very, very similar.

As well as being great for budget gaming laptops, the RTX 4060 is also a great pick for small form factor machines, too. In something like the HP Omen Transcend 14, with its slight chassis and lightweight design, the low-power GPU at its heart is great for keeping thermals down, but also capable of delivering great performance in a truly mobile form factor.

Our Nvidia RTX 4060 gaming laptop reviews:

Best mid-range graphics card for laptops

It’s easy to get caught up in the fact that the RTX 4070 is the third-tier graphics chip in the Ada Lovelace generation, but it’s also worth noting that it’s capable of delivering the same level of gaming performance as the RTX 3080 of last-gen gaming laptops. That was arguably the best graphics card for laptops just a few years ago, and now we’re looking at those same kinds of frame rates in the best mid-range laptop GPU: the RTX 4070.

As is the case with most of the other mobile GPUs in this generation, the laptop version of the RTX 4070 is a step down from the desktop version, coming in with a core spec that’s just a little bit above the RTX 4060 Ti silicon. Sadly, though you are getting more CUDA cores, you don’t get the extra VRAM the 16 GB version of the desktop RTX 4060 Ti can offer, or even the 12 GB of the discrete RTX 4070 you’ll find in a full-size gaming PC. No, here you get 8 GB and you’re going to have to like it or lump it.

At standard 1080p gaming resolutions that’s not going to be a hassle in even some of the most demanding of modern games, but you’ll likely see the RTX 4070 mobile strapped into laptops with higher spec screens; either 1440p or 1600p. At that level the extra video memory would have come in handy—luckily you still get the twin might of DLSS 3 and Frame Generation to help boost those native frame rates.

And those native frame rates, however, are still pretty decent even running at 1440p, and really impressive at 1080p. When you consider that the pricing of RTX 4070-powered gaming laptops are consistently dropping, that makes the sort of gaming chops you get with them even more tantalising.

At the moment you can regularly pick up an RTX 4070 gaming laptop—with a high TDP, too—for less than $1,500. Realistically, I wouldn’t look at paying any more than that for one unless there’s a special reason to. If it’s a particularly premium device, such as a Razer Blade 14 or 15, or one of the gorgeous new Asus ROG Zephyrus machines, then there’s a case to be made, but if you’re just after the most affordable RTX 4070 laptop then there’s no reason to pay more.

In fact, today and most definitely around the late-year sales periods, you’re liable to find great RTX 4070 gaming laptops for as little as $1,200. When you think you might have been lucky to get an RTX 4060 machine for that last year, it’s a pleasing turnaround for proper gaming laptop performance.

Our Nvidia RTX 4070 gaming laptop reviews:

Best high-end graphics card for laptops

Okay, I get it. It probably seems kinda hypocritical of me to stick the RTX 4090 in as the best high-end GPU when I have been pretty explicit in the past recommending people steer clear of gaming laptops powered by that beast. But that is primarily because most of the time the RTX 4090 is just getting jammed into the same chassis designed for lower performance, lower power graphics silicon. 

When the top Ada Lovelace mobile GPU is thermally constrained by a tight laptop chassis and the associated cooling, then you will often see gaming performance that is on par—and sometimes even behind—a cheaper, more balanced machine powered by an RTX 4080.

BUT (see, that’s a big ‘but’ so pay attention) if the laptop manufacturer has made sure to pair Nvidia’s GPU with a proper cooling solution designed to cope with this sort of power-hungry, hot silicon, then the result is the best gaming performance you will see outside of a hulking desktop.

That does mean that a good RTX 4090 machine will necessarily also be a big gaming laptop, arguably more of a desktop replacement, but conversely that doesn’t have to mean some grotesque slab like the MSI Titan GT77HX. The most powerful gaming laptop I’ve ever tested is the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 with AMD’s stellar Ryzen 9 7945HX3D inside it. And while it’s no shrinking violet of a notebook with its 17-inch display, it’s still a pretty lovely looking device.

Okay, I am a bit of a sucker for an RGB strip, but it’s still a great laptop.

The combination of the extra cooling capacity of a 17-inch frame and the 3D V-cache CPU mean the RTX 4090 is able to really flex its gaming muscles and it shows in the performance figures. 

With 9728 CUDA cores and 16 GB of GDDR6 memory you are looking at a mobile GPU with the essential specs of the desktop RTX 4080. Now, just for a second, go look at what an RTX 4080 graphics card looks like… big, isn’t it? That’s the sort of cooling you need to keep that GPU running at peak performance and you can instantly see why as a graphics chip it utterly fails when packed into a seriously thermally constrained environment.

If you’re not going to give it room to shine, just don’t bother.

Obviously, with the desktop equivalent GPU retailing for around $1,000 on its own, an RTX 4090 laptop is not going to be a cheap thing. The most affordable we’ve seen recently has been the Acer Predator Helios 18 at around $3,000, but normally you’d be looking somewhere between $3,500 and $4,000. Which is a lot for any laptop.

But if you want the best gaming performance from a laptop, but also the best GPU performance for productivity tasks in what could be a mobile workstation, then the RTX 4090 is the graphics card you want filling your next laptop.

Our Nvidia RTX 4090 gaming laptop reviews:

Best integrated graphics

Finally, there’s an AMD GPU in the list. Sorry,  AMD fans, when it comes to graphics cards for laptops there is such a heavy weighting towards Nvidia’s discrete mobile GPUs that Radeon chips barely get a look-in. That’s shared at the manufacturer level where you will find precious few AMD graphics cards being used in laptops you can actually buy. 

The counter to that is with regards to integrated graphics. If you want a mobile machine without a dedicated graphics card, but still with actually decent gaming performance, then right now you either buy a device with an AMD APU inside it or you suffer with Intel’s patchy gaming performance.

This is why, when you look at the handheld gaming PC market it’s almost entirely AMD-based, from the Steam Deck and up. And the best current integrated graphics chip (iGPU) is the latest Radeon 890M that you’ll find in the current AMD Ryzen AI HX 300-series.

It’s a pretty big upgrade from the Radeon 780M, which you’ll find in all the latest handhelds, offering 16 RDNA 3.5 compute units (CUs) compared with the previous top chip’s 12 CUs, or the eight CUs you’ll find in the Steam Deck OLED’s Sephiroth APU. In terms of shader count, that’s a 33% uplift on the previous gen.

And it makes for a big difference in gaming performance, too, and in a lot of cases is pretty linear in line with that core count boost. We’ve seen frame rate boosts of anywhere between 20% and 38% higher average fps.

The Radeon 890M isn’t yet available in any gaming handheld we’ve tested yet—the ROG Ally X is still using the same APU despite its other upgrades—but you will find it in a host of new laptops, from standard to actual gaming designs. But it’s worth noting that not all of the new Strix Point, Ryzen AI chips sport the top iGPU. It’s only the Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 and HX 370—the two 12-core variants—which come with the full 16 CU GPU. The Ryzen AI 9 365 uses the Radeon 880M which comes with the same 12 CU config as the Radeon 780M.

The main takeaway here, though, is that with AMD’s latest iGPUs you’re getting genuine 1080p gaming performance, even if you do have to be a little more studious about how you manage your graphics settings. High settings can still be achieved, but medium and low settings are more likely to get you a better experience. Though AMD’s Fluid Motion Frames 2 feature (AFMF2) is functioning on the new mobile chips, and that gives you universal frame generation on any DX11 or DX12 game, and that can deliver great performance gains for integrated graphics.

The benefits of AMD’s iGPUs are obvious for standard office-style laptops—you can do some light gaming on your down time or while travelling—but it’s also a boon for gaming laptops, too. They have traditionally poor gaming battery life, meaning that truly mobile gaming is often not do-able on them for more than 60 mins at best. Switch over to your iGPU, however, and you can carry on playing away from the plug socket for a hell of a lot longer when your dedicated GPU is lying dormant and not sucking up all the juice.

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