Nvidia makes some of the best graphics cards to be found in laptops, but some of these GPUs might be closer in terms of performance than you’d expect. The laptop version of the RTX 5080 has been benchmarked, and it’s shockingly close to the RTX 5090. Are the laptops equipped with the RTX 5090 still worth buying?
Notebookcheck was able to compare the RTX 5090 and the RTX 5080 laptop GPUs under ideal circumstances: In two iterations of the same laptop. The cards were both paired with AMD’s Ryzen 9 9955HX CPU, which removes a lot of the usual benchmarking discrepancy you’d run into in laptops. When both are installed in similar systems, we can get a good feel of how each card performs without external factors, and that is the case in these benchmarks.
Both tests involve the Schenker Neo 16 A25 laptop, but one sports the RTX 5080 and the other is the flagship model with the eye-wateringly expensive RTX 5090. Before we dig in, it’s worth noting that the RTX 5080 and 5090 have a huge difference in specs between them. The flagship model sports 10,496 CUDA cores and 24GB of GDDR7 RAM; meanwhile, the RTX 5080 is limited to just 7,680 cores and 16GB of VRAM. With that said, they both have the same maximum total graphics power (TGP) of 150 watts, or 175W with Dynamic Boost, but the RTX 5080 can go as low as 80 watts while the RTX 5090 needs at least 90W.
Based on the benchmarks, that difference in specs hardly matters. The RTX 5080 is only about 10 to 15% slower than the RTX 5090 in gaming scenarios, and that’s regardless of whether DLSS is being used or not. Sure, a 15% difference is noticeable, but it’s not going to make or break your game.
The RTX 5090 laptop GPU was benchmarked earlier this week, and it turned out to be over 50% slower than the desktop version. This isn’t unexpected — it all comes down to power draw and thermal restrictions in laptops. The story repeats itself here, where we compare two different GPUs with the same power draw. There’s only so much they can do without extra power.
Depending on the price, it might be a better idea to buy a laptop with the RTX 5080 instead of the RTX 5090, but this isn’t a blanket statement. I recommend checking out benchmarks of the model you’re interested in buying before making your final decision. Both will be expensive, but we’ll have to wait for more budget-oriented laptops to arrive within the next few months.
