Nvidia forces laptop makers to be transparent about their RTX 30 Mobile specs

Nvidia forces laptop makers to be transparent about their RTX 30 Mobile specs

Nvidia forces laptop makers to be transparent about their RTX 30 Mobile specs

With their RTX 30 series of mobile graphics cards, Nvidia has dropped their Max-Q branding. All mobile RTX 30 series graphics cards will be named based on their CUDA core counts and memory specifications, not based on their power draw, making it hard for buyers to differentiate between low-power gaming notebooks and their high-performance equivalents. 

This move prompted criticism from many PC gamers, as Nvidia’s RTX 30 series of laptops offers system integrators wide TDP ranges. RTX 3080 mobile GPUs can run with GPU subsystem power ranges of between 80 and 150 watts, which means that a low power RTX 3080 config will deliver a lot less performance than a maxed-out high power configuration. To make matters worse, laptop makers did not list their RTX 30 series mobile GPUs’ power ratings, only adding to the confusion. 

Nvidia has heard these criticisms and revealed to The Verge that they would be forcing their laptop partners to list the power consumption figures of their RTX 30 Series mobile GPUs, allowing users to better estimate the performance of the gaming laptops that they are considering. In response to this, laptop OEMs are already updating their websites with more detailed GPU specifications. 
 

    We’re requiring OEMs to update their product pages to the Max-Q technology features for each GeForce laptop, as well as clocks and power — which communicates the expected GPU performance in that system,  

Nvidia forces laptop makers to be transparent about their RTX 30 Mobile specs  
While a lot of the blame for this controversy lies with OEMs, many of which refused to list the GPU power specifications of their RTX 30 series laptops, Nvidia also deserves some blame for creating this controversy. Nvidia were the ones that allowed RTX 30 series mobile GPUs to feature such wide power limits, and they are also the ones who abandoned their Max-Q branding for notebooks with power-optimised GPU configurations. 

Nvidia has done the right thing by forcing their OEM partners to list their RTX 30 series mobile GPU power specifications, but they are undeniably the source of this controversy. Until all of Nvidia’s OEM partners update their specifications listings, purchasers of RTX 30 series notebooks will not know what they are buying, as not all RTX 30 series mobile GPUs are created equally. 

Nvidia forces laptop makers to be transparent about their RTX 30 Mobile specs(Nvidia’s RTX 30 series of mobile GPUs and their wide range of power limits)  

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