Do you guys have a say in the laptop GPUs?

[Ragnaraz690]

I ask this question because it's not exactly news that Nvidia have ROYALLY destroyed mid range GPUs. It's literally like they made all the effort on the 4090 as a big ol cash cow then flipped anyone off on a budget.

Take for example the 3070 vs the 4070 laptops. Although the architecture is better, you get less cores than previous models they didn't bother to stretch the VRAM to 10gb which is the least they should have done. Then comes the biggest slap in the face, the memory bus. 3070? 256bit. 4070? 128bit. That is absolutely atrocious, no more VRAM and half the bus on a new generation. It's more of a 4060ti than an actual 4070 they even share the same lame bit bus. The ONLY saving grace is the DLSS 3 which lets face it, without that tech at the moment, those cards would be an even bigger waste of money. Nvidia have basically made a horrible niche market. everything but the 4080/90 is pathetic. The lower cards could be so much better. 3070/4070 cards are meant to be decent 1440 options, but with all the new games 8gb of VRAM and a terrible bus renders them obsolete really. may as well save money and get a 4060 if you really need one.

My point? If you actually have a say in how your laptop GPUs are, you could actually make them worth while. Because for the money all OEMs are asking for the increase you're actually getting without frame gen... not worth it at all. This probably won't change a thing, but it's a disgusting move by any involved IMO.

[xeromist]

No, the board partners don't really have a say. Nvidia designs and fabs all the chips, which are then sold to the companies who put them on a PCB, design coolers for them, and sell them to us. There is flexibility in tuning and cooler designs, but architecturally everything is set in stone by the time anyone outside of Nvidia knows anything. Nvidia maintains tight secrecy even from its own partners. This has been reported by multiple tech outlets over the years. One example that has been provided is that partners don't even know how much they are allowed to charge for base models until Jensen is on stage announcing the prices to the world. It seems like all of this and more was enough to cause EVGA to quit producing Nvidia GPUs entirely.

[Ragnaraz690]

I did read into everything Nvidia has generally done to board partners, the biggest back stab was making their own retail units undercutting partners knowing full well partners have to charge more because of all the R&D into their own boards and the cost of the chips themselves. EVGA did right in cutting ties, it would be interesting to see how they would fair with AMD. Honestly, I hope AMD starts thrashing Nvidia, not because I'm a fan boy, but because look what it did to the CPU market. Intel actually had to do more and cut prices.

Nvidia currently is bottlenecking lower cards with RAM allocation and bus speeds. Either that or the chips can't utilise the greater bus, which becomes more of a disappointment because that should bolster the performance even more. On the whole, unless you can fork out silly money on a top end card mobile or desktop, the only real upgrade you're getting is DLSS 3.