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Nvidia’s next-gen GPU may be a hit for laptop gamers

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Forza Horizon 5 running on the Alienware x14 R2.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

Nvidia’s RTX 50-series is still shrouded in mystery, but today, we got an exciting report about the upcoming RTX 5060 laptop GPU. According to the chairman of Hasee, a Chinese laptop and desktop manufacturer, the RTX 5060 will feature a sizable upgrade, all the while cutting back on the power consumption. Is the RTX 5060 going to be one of the best graphics cards for laptop gamers, including the ones who prefer thin notebooks?

The juicy scoop, first shared via Weibo, comes from Hasee’s chairman Wu Haijun, who talked about the RTX 5060 during a meeting with the media. The chairman claimed that the next-gen xx60 graphics card will only consume 115 watts of power, as opposed to the 140W total graphics power (TGP) we’ve seen in the RTX 4060.

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In a laptop, such power savings are huge, and this could enable the RTX 5060 to run well even in laptops with a thin chassis. Not all the best gaming laptops have to be massive, after all, and discrete GPUs do appear in smaller notebooks these days.

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Wu Haijun also confirmed that the entire lineup will use GDDR7 VRAM. This isn’t exactly news — we’ve already seen it in leaked slides from Clevo, another laptop manufacturer. In any case, hearing that even mainstream and laptop cards will get the anticipated memory upgrade is good news.

According to Wccftech, this will put the RTX 5060 laptop GPU on the level of the RTX 4070 (also in the laptop version). The Blackwell card is said to actually outperform the RTX 4070M in ray tracing, and perhaps even match the card in rasterization.

A slide showing Nvidia's RTX 50-series road map.
Dominic Alvieri / X/Twitter

The fact that the laptop version of the RTX 5060 will match the RTX 4070 in performance is not groundbreaking — this is the type of improvement most gamers would expect to see. However, the switch to GDDR7 memory should make for much better bandwidth, although the RTX 5060 is still said to have the same 128-bit memory bus as its predecessor. That points to 8GB VRAM, and the past couple of years have really started to show us that 8GB doesn’t quite cut it.

Still, the 8GB of VRAM (which is still a rumor at this point) can be excused in a GPU with a 115-watt TGP. If the RTX 5060M turns out to be exactly like Hasee described, it sounds like Nvidia will have another hit on its hands. The xx60 GPUs are often the most popular picks in any generation. If AMD’s laptop GPU presence remains as it has been in this generation, Nvidia may not even have much competition in that segment.

The RTX 50-series is now rumored to launch in early 2025, so we may see the first Blackwell laptops announced in January during CES 2025.

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Monica J. White
Monica J. White
Computing Writer
Monica is a UK-based freelance writer and self-proclaimed geek. A firm believer in the "PC building is just like expensive…
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