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Laptops with Nvidia’s RTX graphics are rumored to arrive at CES 2019

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Riley Young/Digital Trends

Gamers looking to get ray tracing support in a more mobile form factor than Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2080 graphics card on the desktop will have to wait until at least CES. It’s believed that Nvidia will announce its mobile RTX cards in January, specifically around the timeline of January 6, 2019, according to Wccftech. This timeline matches an earlier rumor suggesting that the company could unveil its mobile-friendly RTX graphics cards around the time of CES.

“The new mobility lineup that will be launching at CES will include the RTX 2070 and the 2070 Max-Q parts along with the 2060, 2050 Ti and 2050,” Wccftech reported. “We do know the 2080 Max-Q is in the works as well but we aren’t sure whether it will launch along with its other siblings or have a staggered release date.”

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Nvidia and its manufacturing partners could begin to seed review units in early January, but drivers for the mobile versions of the RTX cards may not be ready in time. According to the publication, the early samples and prototypes will come with pre-release drivers, meaning that the performance on these initial units is not what gamers can expect with the final versions of the driver.

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If you’re keeping up with news on how the mobile RTX cards stack up against the desktop RTX or even the previous generation GTX cards, you may want to also take early performance leaks — if any — with a grain of salt, as the performance of the new mobile RTX cards is expected to improve once the final drivers arrives.

It’s now expected that final shipping laptops will arrive around February. Previously, we’ve heard rumors that Nvidia is working with laptop manufacturers to standardize the notebook’s thickness, so we can expect powerful gaming systems to come in thin packages once the mobile RTX cards arrive.

Curiously, however, the branding of these cards may still be up in the air, and some lower-tier offerings could still utilize the older GTX branding, according to the publication’s source. “Our source did not explicitly name all of these as the RTX series so its possible the lower tier GPUs are still branded GTX because below the 2070 the ‘RTX’ portion of Nvidia’s graphics doesn’t really make sense,” the site added.

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