I Put Nvidia’s RTX 50-Series Laptop GPU to the Test. Here’s What I Found

Two months after the anticipated desktop RTX 5090 and RTX 5080, the next phase of Nvidia's next-gen graphics card lineup is finally here. I tried out the RTX 5090 mobile onboard the new Razer Blade 16, and while I'll have broader thoughts on the machine soon in a review, I first want to focus on how the RTX 5090 itself feels on a gaming laptop.

Nvidia's RTX 50 series has some interesting advances over the preceding RTX 40 series. The open approach to multi-frame generation, which uses artificial intelligence to generate additional frames to offer higher frame rates when gaming, has been fun to tweak. The extra VRAM in these cards is important in delivering smoother graphics too. But the increase in raw graphics performance is disappointingly small, and for a flagship GPU launching an entirely new architecture at the peak of Nvidia's power, it left me wishing there was more on offer.

The Laptop Matters

Nvidia did provide some caveats when handing over a Razer Blade 16 to test. It's a thinner model than previous years—likely one of the thinnest gaming laptops with an RTX 5090 at the least. Razer had to shave off an extra 15 watts of total graphics power (TGP) to get it this tiny, meaning this laptop isn't the best showcase for the 5090's maximum performance. That said, Nvidia is no doubt proud to show off an RTX 5090 in a chassis that's just 0.59 inches at its thinnest. The Blade also uses the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 CPU instead of the beefier Intel chip in last year’s model.

But we're about to be inundated with gaming laptops with graphics cards up to the RTX 5090. Unlike the RTX 5090 desktop GPU, it won't be sold out and impossible to find at a decent price. Speaking of, it's important to know that although it shares a name, the laptop version of the RTX 5090 doesn't sit in the same category as the corresponding desktop GPU. Instead, it's built on the same GPU (GB203) as the desktop RTX 5080. The mismatched naming has been used for the past few generations, despite the confusion it creates.