Alleged NVIDIA GeForce RTX Mobility Lineup Leaked, CES 2019 Debut Likely
The dust hasn't even had to time to settle on NVIDIA's desktop GeForce RTX series graphics cards, but as we're still exploring the full capabilities of these new parts, there is already chatter of mobile variants laying in the wings. It's not a matter of if, but when, and we could see mobile GeForce RTX GPUs unveiled within the next few months.
Why does this matter if, for the most part, Pascal is still getting the job done? Better performance is welcome, even if it's not earth-shattering. More importantly, however, porting the GeForce RTX family over to mobile opens the door to real-time ray tracing in games on laptops, as that is really the signature feature of NVIDIA's Turing architecture.
We still don't know what kind of performance impact enabling NVIDIA's RTX technology will have on a wide swath of games, and by extension, the same applies to mobile. However, the parts will inevitably come. According to sources that spoke with WCCFTech, NVIDIA has developed a GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q mobility GPU, which will be the flagship part in the mobile series.
That will not be the only mobile GPU, though. The site goes its hands on a document that lists several other upcoming mobile GPUs, including the GeForce RTX 2070 Mobility, GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q Mobility, GeForce RTX 2060 Ti Mobility, GeForce RTX 2060 Mobility, GeForce RTX 2050 Ti Mobility, and GeForce RTX 2050 Mobility. These are said to be launching around the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) a few months from now.
Naturally you should take all this with a grain of salt. However, if you allow yourself to roll around in the rumors for a moment, it looks as though NVIDIA will use the same mobile strategy that currently exists for Pascal, which is to break up its lineup into standard and Max-Q variants, the latter of which are intended for thin and light systems.
Part of what's interesting here is the lack of any GTX models. Past rumors have pointed to NVIDIA releasing lower power GTX variants in the 2000 series on the desktops. These would presumably offer a performance bump in rasterization rendering over Pascal, but would lack functioning RT cores for real-time ray tracing. We don't know if that's actually true, though.
In any event, it will be interesting to see what NVIDIA rolls out for gaming laptops, as well as what impact mobile RTX parts might have on the overall price.
