Skip to main content

Nvidia is cheating with its GPUs, and that’s great for laptops

With some AI trickery, Nvidia has managed to cheat the traditional rendering pipeline for games. And that makes traditionally underpowered laptops so much better.

Its latest RTX 40-series mobile GPUs are very powerful — especially if you jump up to the RTX 4090 in a machine like the Asus Strix Scar 17. But it’s the low-end options where Nvidia is really pushing ahead. That isn’t due to raw power, but instead Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), Nvidia’s AI-powered upscaling and frame generation tech.

Surface Laptop Studio 2 showing its gaming ability.
Jacob Roach / DigitalTrends

This became clear at Microsoft’s Surface event, where the company debuted its Surface Laptop Studio 2. Walking around the demo room, I spotted a Microsoft rep playing Cyberpunk 2077, and it looked great. Consistent, smooth, dare I say with ray tracing enabled? I’m not positive ray tracing was enabled, to be clear, but the game still looked stunning. Surely, I thought, this is running from the cloud. Even the RTX 4060, which is the top spec GPU for the Surface Laptop Studio 2, isn’t that powerful. “No, it’s local,” the rep told me.

Recommended Videos

Two years ago, when Microsoft announced the original Surface Laptop Studio, I wrote about why it could finally be a proper gaming laptop for Microsoft. My argument was mainly based on the fact that it even had a dedicated GPU, something that was rare to find in this type of laptop at the time, as well as the cloud ecosystem available through Xbox Game Pass.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!

It looks so quaint in hindsight — I was talking about how the RTX 3050 Ti might be too weak with only 4GB of VRAM. “Unusable” is the term I’d use today. The idea would be to use the underpowered GPU for some games locally, while relying on streaming for the heavy hitters like Cyberpunk 2077. Oh, how things have changed.

Someone playing Xbox on a Surface Laptop Studio.
Microsoft

In two years — and a single generation of GPUs and laptops — look at where we are. The original Surface Laptop Studio can kind of run games, but only the type of games where you have to turn down the resolution, stick with the medium preset, and squint to get over the frame drops. Now, the Surface Laptop Studio 2 is running Cyberpunk 2077, still one of the most demanding PC games around, at what looked to be high settings and smooth frame rates.

We have Nvidia to thank for that, and its seemingly relentless dedication to shortcuts on the rendering pipeline. DLSS launched as a disaster before turning into the de facto upscaling tech. It moved on to DLSS Frame Generation, and now we even have Ray Reconstruction through DLSS 3.5. And all of these features are available on the Surface Laptop Studio 2 (or any RTX 40-series laptop).

These features are nice to have for high-end graphics cards, but they make all the difference for a device like the Surface Laptop Studio 2. In particular, Frame Generation through DLSS 3 is a literal game changer. It inserts a frame between each rendered frame in supported games, Cyberpunk 2077 being among them. This essentially doubles your frame rate, so if you were playing a game at 30 frames per second (fps), it would appear as 60 fps. There’s some overhead, but it doesn’t account for much when stacked on top of DLSS Super Resolution.

Nvidia's DLSS 3 in Cyberpunk 2077.
Nvidia

It’s cheating. It allows much weaker graphics cards to look as if they’re performing much faster than they are. To be clear, I’m not saying cheating is bad here, or that it’s somehow lazy. It probably took a massive amount of work on Nvidia’s end to get Frame Generation working properly. But it’s a way for Nvidia to shortcut the rendering pipeline, relying on clever AI tech instead of raw computing power, and traditionally underpowered laptops are the ones that benefit because of it.

I don’t want to leave here acting as if DLSS 3.5 is perfect, though. I’ve already talked about my issues with DLSS Frame Generation, and you might want to leave it off if you already have a powerful desktop PC. But when the other option is playing games from the cloud, as is the case with a lot of non-gaming laptops, DLSS Frame Generation looks a whole lot more attractive.

Laptops especially benefit from this tech, since upgrades aren’t possible (outside of machines like the Framework laptop). As the hardware inevitably ages out and more demanding games release, they’ll (hopefully) come with Frame Generation as well, giving you a little more life than the raw hardware is capable of.

I’ve started seeing more low-end gaming laptops, as well as creator-focused machines, packing an RTX 4050 or RTX 4060. This class of GPUs was traditionally designed to accelerate some professional tasks and allow you to pick up a game of Civilization VI when you had a free minute. With DLSS Frame Generation, they’re capable GPUs offering playable frame rates in the most demanding games.

Nvidia is cheating with DLSS Frame Generation, but that makes laptops that otherwise wouldn’t be suitable for gaming much more powerful.

Jacob Roach
Lead Reporter, PC Hardware
Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…
Nvidia DLSS is amazing, but only if you use it the right way
Lies of P on the KTC G42P5.

Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling, or DLSS, has become a cornerstone feature of modern PC games. It started as a way to boost your performance by rendering a game at a lower resolution, but the prominence and popularity of DLSS have prompted Nvidia to add even more features under the name.

Today, DLSS incorporates several different features, all of which leverage AI to boost performance and/or image quality. It can be intimidating if you're a new RTX user, so I'm here to break down all of the increases of DLSS in 2024 and how you can best leverage it in supported games.
The many features of DLSS

Read more
Nvidia is replacing its crusty, Windows XP-era app with something much better
A screenshot of the Nvidia app.

Nvidia's latest announcement is one that many of us have been waiting for. The company is releasing a new software solution that will, hopefully, one day replace the Nvidia Control Panel and GeForce Experience. Dubbed simply "Nvidia App," the software is now in beta and is available for testing.

Those of us who own some of Nvidia's top GPUs (or even some of the worst ones) are forced to use the Nvidia Control Panel for tuning things like display settings, game performance, and monitor refresh rates. Meanwhile, GeForce Experience optimizes game settings and provides an in-game overlay that can be used for things like recording bits of your gameplay. The lack of a unified app can get confusing and annoying to those who aren't familiar with it.

Read more
The RTX 4090 is past its prime, and that’s OK
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU.

In October 2022, when I first reviewed the RTX 4090, I called it "both a complete waste of money and the most powerful graphics card ever made." That's even more true now that it was more than a year ago. The AI boom shortly after the launch of the RTX 4090, combined with some international restrictions on the GPU, has caused prices to skyrocket to unattainable places, moving the affordability from unlikely to basically impossible.

But that's changing. Reports indicate that prices are slowly dropping, moving from a high of $2,200 down to around $2,000. That's still way above the GPU's list price of $1,600, but the trajectory now is at least positive.

Read more