NVIDIA Announces 2020 Crop of GeForce Laptops with new Acer Predator Triton and Nitro 5 Models

[Guest_Jim_*]

Like what happens with many products that get yearly refreshes, the season for new laptops has arrived and NVIDIA has announced what we can expect this year for laptops with GeForce GPUs. First up, there are over 100 designs coming from every major OEM and the pricing starts at $699 for laptops with a GeForce GTX GPU and $999 for GeForce RTX-powered laptops. We can expect to see the first laptops appear in the market the week of April 15, with more coming in May.

This year's new laptops will introduce RTX Super series GPUs, which can offer significantly more performance than the original RTX 20-Series GPUs. Obviously this is important for those who will be gaming on their laptops or running other applications that require powerful GPUs, but in laptops efficiency is also important. Both the RTX 2070 Super and RTX 2080 Super will be present in Max-Q configurations that will try to offer the best balance of performance, efficiency, and physical size, so you can have good battery life in a thinner and lighter device than some desktop-replacement class laptops. Max-Q has also gotten some new technologies to further improve performance including Advanced Optimus and Max-Q Dynamic Boost.

Advanced Optimus is, as the name suggests, an improvement to NVIDIA's Optimus technology for switching between a laptop's integrated GPU and discrete GPU. For starters, it enables G-Sync support, so you can get the better battery-life from using a less-powerful iGPU without sacrificing the tear-free and stutter-free experience G-Sync offers. The first laptops to offer Advanced Optimus will be Lenovo's Legion 5i and Legion 7i gaming laptops.

Max-Q Dynamic Boost reminds me of AMD's SmartShift technology unveiled at CES 2020. Traditionally the CPU and GPU in a laptop both have their own power budget, which are separate and fixed. What these technologies do is monitor the situation and will re-balance the power available depending on the situation. For Max-Q Dynamic Boost, this can allow up to 15 W of power to be taken from the CPU's budget and given to the GPU, if the workload is GPU-bound and the CPU can give up that power. NVIDIA has been working with its OEM partners to develop this for supported models.

Another technology being deployed to improve efficiency is DLSS 2.0, which I can definitely see being impactful in laptops. Like the original version of DLSS, DLSS 2.0 allows a game to be run at a lower internal resolution, improving performance, and then applies a trained neural network to enhance this lower resolution image, potentially bringing it back to the quality and detail level of an image rendered at the native resolution. As laptop displays are usually smaller than a desktop's display, I could see this being a very effective use of DLSS 2.0 as imperfections it may leave may also be harder to see on a smaller screen. NVIDIA is claiming it can offer up to 20% longer battery life when gaming with its BatteryBoost technology.

Besides offering new gaming laptops, 25 of which will sport 300 Hz displays, new GeForce RTX Studio laptops are also coming with upgrades to RTX Super GPUs. These laptops will have factory-calibrated displays and offer fast memory and storage needed by the professionals these products are targeting. Many applications now also support acceleration with RTX GPUs, and NVIDIA also notes it will be possible to edit 6K RED RAW video in real-time with at least some of these laptops, which is definitely going to help those who work with such footage. For a limited time RTX Studio laptops will also come with three months of Adobe Creative Cloud.

Naturally NVIDIA is not the only company with laptop news today, as Acer announced two of the laptops we will see from it soon. The Predator Triton 500 and Acer Nitro 5 are both gaming laptops that will offer NVIDIA GeForce GTX and RTX Super GPUs paired with 10^th Gen Intel Core processors. The Predator Triton 500 is the higher-end of these two laptops and will offer up to the RTX 2080 Super or RTX 2070 Super with Max-Q Design. It is also one of the 300 Hz laptops with an IPS panel supporting a 3 ms overdrive response time and it will cover 100% of the sRGB color gamut. Other components include a Killer Wi-Fi 6 AX1650i wireless controller, E3100G Ethernet controller, up to 2 TB of NVMe storage in RAID 0 and 32 GB of DDR4 memory. All of this is in a 17.9 mm (0.7 in) thick package, weighing in at just 2.1 Kg (4.63 lbs) with an all-metal chassis.

The new Acer Nitro 5 will come with up to a 10^th Gen Intel Core i7 CPU capable of reaching 5 GHz paied with an RTX 2060 or GTX 1650 or GTX 1650 Ti GPU. For storage it can hold two m.2 PCIe SSDs and a 1 TB HDD and 32 GB of DDR4 memory in two DIMM slots users will be able to get to and upgrade themselves. Depending on the model, it can have its 15.6 inch 1920x1080 display reach 120 Hz or 144 Hz with 3 ms response times while the panel covers 72% of the NTSC gamut. For networking, it will offer Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201 and Killer Ethernet E2600.

Both laptops will be available starting in May with the Nitro 5 starting at $749.99 and the Predator Triton starting at $2199.99.

Source: NVIDIA and Acer

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