Why it matters: Nvidia just announced some new laptop products which are coming early next year. Most odd is that one of them is a line of laptops featuring a never-before-revealed RTX 2050. It looks like another unexpected measure to work within the supply-choked GPU market.
The new RTX 2050, MX570, and MX550 GPUs should give more choices to customers with different hardware requirements. We already have laptops equipped with the more recent Ampere generation’s RTX 3050, but perhaps the 2050 will be a cheaper option (3050 laptops go for around $800). Even at a lower price point, the RTX 2050 will have all the technologies associated with Nvidia’s latest graphics cards: RT cores, Tensor cores, DLSS, Nvidia Reflex, Nvidia Broadcast, Nvidia Encounter, and Nvidia Optimus.
It’s hard to say how it will perform, though. TechSpot’s review of the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti laptop noted its paltry 4GB of VRAM hurt its ray-tracing performance. Nvidia did just release a 12GB desktop 2060 in another attempt to ease some pressure in the GPU market. So maybe a new laptop 20 series card won’t be short on RAM. The 3050 Ti review also questioned its place in the market compared to the cheaper 1650 or more powerful 3060.
As for the other two cards, the newly announced MX570 is the fastest MX GPU yet. Nvidia hasn’t revealed detailed specs, but it will have more CUDA cores and faster memory. As the successor to the MX450, the GeForce MX550 will outperform integrated graphics with snappy performance in applications like Adobe Lightroom and Premiere Pro.
All three cards are planned for Spring 2022, but Nvidia has not mentioned specific laptop models at this time.