A new line of Studio laptops have been announced at Nvidia’s CES 2022 press conference. According to Jeff Fisher, Nvidia Senior Vice President of GeForce, they are seven times faster than Apple’s latest MacBook Pro in specific 3D design workflows.
That’s quite a hefty claim, considering how powerful Apple’s new M1 Max MacBook Pros are. However, based on what was revealed, these new laptops will certainly pack a powerful punch and give Apple a run for its money.
The new Studio laptops will come with either the RTX 3080 Ti or 3070 Ti. The 3080 variants will have 16GB of GDDR6 memory, which is some of the fastest memory launched with a laptop. According to Nvidia, it even outperforms the desktop Titan RTX.
The RTX 3070 Ti option is no slouch either, delivering up to 70% faster performance over RTX 2070 SUPER laptops.
Nvidia spoke at length about the importance of 3D designers and modelers in the future, and how its Studio laptops specifically address that type of creative professional.
In the graph above, Nvidia compares an RTX 3080 Ti laptop against the M1 Max MacBook Pro, as well an RTX 3060 laptop. Popular 3D modeling applications such as Blender Cycles and Autodesk Arnold show just how large of a leap ahead Nvidia is referring to.
Of course, unlike Apple and Microsoft’s pro-oriented laptops, Nvidia’s Studio laptops are not manufactured by the company. Asus, MSI, and Razer are all launching Nvidia laptops in the Studio range starting in February. That means official performance will vary between manufacturers and other components used in the build. Nvidia didn’t specify what specific laptop it was testing, nor how thick or heavy it was.
While these devices will certainly do well for gaming, they are more aimed at creative professionals. This announcement comes alongside the announcement of Nvidia Omniverse becoming widely available. Omniverse is the company’s free design program for augmented reality.
For general PC enthusiasts, Nvidia also announced an entry-level RTX 3050 GPU for desktops. It offers all the benefits of the top-tier cards (real-time ray tracing, A.I., and video acceleration), but starts at just $279. It should generate some hype given the ongoing component shortage of the past few years, and it is set to release worldwide on January 27.
Nvidia is starting the year strong with these announcements, and with the Studio laptops only weeks away, it will be interesting to see if the company’s comparisons to M1 live up to the hype. We called the Apple 2021 MacBook Pros the best MacBooks in years in our review and praised the video playback and performance in GPU-intensive applications.