With Nvidia RTX 50-series gaming laptops now up for grabs, we're starting to see new GPU benchmarks roll in. Unsurprisingly, the RTX 5090 laptop GPU has become the best-performing mobile graphics card on the market — but it comes with a strange result.
An RTX 5090 laptop GPU has shown up on benchmarking site PassMark, with numbers that rank it as the best laptop GPU right now. In the G3D Mark performance chart, it scores 28,280, pulling ahead the RTX 4090 laptop GPU, which reaches 27,467. Interestingly, it even competes with AMD Radeon desktop GPUs, surpassing the AMD RX 6950 XT (28,128) and only a little behind the Radeon RX 7900 XT (28,877).
This benchmark measures the performance of high-end graphics cards, and seeing an RTX 5090 mobile GPU high up the list is a good sign of how well this laptop graphics card performs. Of course, it's no match for an RTX 5090 (scoring 39,209) or RTX 4090 (scoring 38,430) desktop GPUs, but it isn't too far off an RTX 3090 Ti (29,618) or an RTX 4070 Super (30,060).
Seeing as an RTX 5090 laptop's TDP (Thermal Design Power) is 95W to 150W, it shows how the next-gen mobile GPU can handle power with better efficiency. To put that into perspective, an RTX 5090 desktop GPU tops out at 575W, so it's clearly better at beefing up performance.
As pointed out by Notebookcheck, however, the AMD desktop GPUs it competes with aren't anything new, as they've been around as early as 2022. Plus, there's only a 2.79% difference in results compared to the RTX 4090 laptop GPU, showcasing minimal gains.
That said, with RTX 5090 laptops only just emerging, there are still more benchmark tests to be done on a range of laptops. That, and seeing how it boasts 24GB of GDDR7 video memory, 1,824 AI TOPS (trillions of operations per second), 10,496 CUDA cores (these act like CPU cores) along with Nvidia's DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation (in supported PC games), there are other factors that could offer much better performance over its predecessor.
Speaking of performance, it appears the RTX 5090 doesn't do too well in one area, according to PassMark's results...
Wait... falling behind an RTX 4060 in GPU Compute tests?
As spotted in PassMark's GPU Compute benchmark (which tests how well a graphics card supports CPU tasks) the RTX 5090 laptop GPU is surprisingly slightly below an RTX 4060 laptop GPU.
Nvidia's latest card shows a result of 6830 Ops/Sec, while the RTX 4060 comes out with 6831 Ops/Sec. This falls way behind the RTX 4090, which achieves 12,418 Ops/Sec. This is an odd result, considering the RTX 5090's specs and its overall graphics performance score topping all other mobile GPUs.
However, this may be due to a few elements. For one, there is currently only one sample of an RTX 5090 laptop GPU, and it apparently has a max TDP of 95W. Even the RTX 4060 has a max TDP of 115W, and the latest Nvidia card can go a lot higher.
Secondly, as Notebookcheck reports, Nvidia has stopped support for 32-bit frameworks, and this doesn't appear to agree with this PassMark benchmark, as RTX 50-series GPUs have shown up with strangely subpar performance. This is reportedly set to be fixed soon, so this number doesn't appear to be accurate.
Besides, in DirectX PassMark tests, the RTX 5090 laptop GPU performs far greater compared to the RTX 40-series lineup, dishing out 167 frames per second (fps) in DirectX 12, beating the RTX 4090 (106 fps) and the RTX 4060 (73 fps).
It's still early days, as there are plenty of more tests to be done with the wide variety of RTX 50-series gaming laptops coming out. The RTX 5090 laptop GPU is already the best-performing GPU in this benchmark, and it's a good sign we'll see RTX 50-series gaming laptops be worth the upgrade.
More from Tom's Guide
- I review gaming PCs for a living, and I'd never buy the RTX 5090 — here's why
- Help improve Tom's Guide — your chance to win a $250 Amazon gift card
- I just built an RTX 5090 gaming PC — here’s what I used and how to build your own
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