NVIDIA RTX 3050, 3050 Ti GPUs Lift Affordable Gaming Laptops Beyond 60 FPS

The laptop gaming market is firing on all cylinders, and these new NVIDIA GPUs will turbocharge that growth as the new chips power affordable gaming computers, and that’s where the volume is.

These GeForce RTX 3050 laptops start as low as $799, which should result in an impressive “graphics speed per dollar” performance ratio, a key metric when reviewing gaming rigs.

As you might expect, the RTX 3050 is the entry-level model, and the RTX 3050 Ti (Titanium) has more computing units (2560 vs. 2080), leading to an expected ~20% higher shader compute power.

Overall, the RTX 3060 would have nearly twice the shading performance of the RTX 3050 but also cost significantly more. Just look at our recent MSI Stealth 15M with RTX 3060 review.

These new GPUs are most suited for 1080p gaming because their number of ROPs (raster operations pipeline) is in the low 30s. For comparison, the RTX 3060 has 48 ROPs, and the 3070 has 80. The more ROPs and the easier it is to perform in high-resolution.

You get it: these GPUs’ performance matches their price point, but what does it mean in the real world? According to NVIDIA, the GeForce 3050 Ti would perform near 60 FPS in games like OutRiders and WatchDogs Legion.

However, once the NVIDIA DLSS accelerator/optimization is ON, the rendering goes around 70 FPS (for the games cited), making it more likely to have a sustainable 60+ FPS speed.

DLSS or not, the overall speed (for the price) is extraordinary and well above (+50% to +80%) GPUs like the GeForce GTX 1650 Ti that was recently the norm for that price point.

If you’re unfamiliar with the NVIDIA DLSS technology, it stands for (Deep Learning Super Sampling) and uses artificial intelligence (A.I) to scale the level of detail of rendered frames. As a result, it is possible to render the game faster but at a slightly lower resolution and use DLSS to “upscale” the details back into the final frame.

Since DLSS is less computationally expensive than 3D rendering, the overall speed increases. DLSS is a really powerful technique, and the most impressive part is that it is temporally stable (no flickering), unlike most of the AI “enhancements” applied to video (that I’ve seen).

"UNPRECEDENTED GRAPHICS POWER IN A HISTORICALLY UNDERSERVED MARKET"

The new GeForce RTX 3050 and 3050 Ti are an extremely exciting addition to the laptop market because they enable unprecedented graphics power in a historically underserved market. And that’s not just for gaming: Creative users have become dependent on GPU processing, and many can increase their productivity right away with the proper hardware.

OEMs have seen the potential, and an avalanche of products is coming along with NVIDIA’s announcement. Acer has announced several RTX 3050 laptop updates (Triton 300, Helios 300, and Nitro 5). Lenovo has also announced RTX 3050 new laptops with the Lenovo Legion 5i (15”+17”) and Legion 5i Pro (16”). NVIDIA says that 140 OEMs designs are in-flight, so expect many more.

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Computers, Gaming
Tags: GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), NVIDIA