It's been a rocky road for Nvidia RTX 50-series GPUs, with scarce availability and even price increases. But now it's time for laptop GPUs to shine, and looking at this DLSS 4 demo, gaming laptops are about to get a major boost in frame rates.
As shown at Nvidia GDC 2025, a Razer Blade 16 with an RTX 5090 playing Cyberpunk 2077 was put up against a Razer Blade 16 (2024) equipped with an RTX 4090. As Notebookcheck details, there's a huge difference in frame rates — and it's thanks to DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation.
By the numbers
In the demo, the RTX 5090-equipped Blade 16 offered over double the frame rates, reaching 186 frames per second (fps) compared to the RTX 4090 machine at 88 fps. Compared to DLSS 3, Nvidia's next-gen AI upscaling tech delivered over 100% faster frame rates.
That's not all, as the demo also showed the new Blade 16 performing with 43% lower CPU utilization and a higher 25% latency while using DLSS 4. Both laptops were running Cyberpunk 2077 at max settings with the same native resolutions.
As reported, Nvidia says RTX 50-series laptops will rely more on GPUs when gaming over CPUs, with the demo showing 37% higher GPU use with DLSS 4 compared to last year's model with DLSS 3. Apparently, this means gaming laptops with an RTX 50 card can be paired with slower CPUs, which could potentially cut down costs and make for thinner laptops.
The 2025 Razer Blade 16 (now available to pre-order) also comes with the latest AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, which is said to operate at a lower TDP (Thermal Design Power) compared to last year's Blade 16 with an Intel Core i9-14900HX chip.
We've seen how DLSS 4 in action on an RTX 5090 desktop GPU before, and were impressed by the boost in frame rates. Now, with this demo showing the giant leap in gaming laptop performance with DLSS 4, I'm getting excited to see how these mobile machines perform.
More hope for RTX 50-series laptops
I've talked about how RTX 50-series gaming laptops will be worth the upgrade, but that excitement has been slowly dwindling since hearing rumors of the cost of an RTX 5060 Razer Blade 16, and learning about how an RTX 5070 can't match RTX 4090 performance.
However, with this demo, we're getting a taste of the improvements DLSS 4 offers, and those sky-high frame rates are a welcome sight. Of course, this is a tested environment, and DLSS 4 only works in supported PC games. Still, it's clear next-gen gaming laptops are set to impress.
We'll have to wait and see just how well RTX 50 graphics card in laptops perform once we get our hands on them, and here's hoping it isn't just a pricy RTX 5090-equipped gaming laptop that shines.
In the meantime, we've also had a look at Half-Life 2 RTX using Nvidia's RTX Remix, and it presented a new level of horror thanks to the updated textures and lighting.
More from Tom's Guide
- I review gaming laptops for a living — here's the 7 RTX 50-series laptops I would buy
- RTX 5090 price continues to rise — prepare to spend around $3,000 for Nvidia's GPU
- HP reveals new RTX 50-series gaming laptops — and the Omen 16 Slim is the first on my radar
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