WINNER: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Mobile

This

is the first time I’ve ever awarded a laptop GPU the prestigious GPU of the year award, and it’s for very good reason. Ever since gaming laptops have been around with discrete graphics chips, they’ve had to make do with hobbled versions of their desktop counterparts. Despite this, they’ve been nearly identically named, yet offered a fraction of the performance, leading to much confusion amongst potential purchasers. That all changed in 2017 when Nvidia unveiled its brand new Pascal architecture.

The desktop debut of this amazing piece of hardware was exciting already, with a huge performance boost over its prior architecture, and very cool VR acceleration features that make a massive difference when rendering two different viewports into a game scene. However, it was Nvidia’s ability to deliver basically the same chipset as a mobile version that blew my mind. Overnight the gaming laptop performance paradigm shifted dramatically; no longer would mobile gamers have to make do with lowly performance, instead now gaming on an even basis as their desk-bound brethren.

Nvidia even managed to do the same with its GeForce GTX 1080 product, but the 1070 Mobile really hit the sweet spot when it came to price versus performance. It’s not quite identical to the desktop GTX 1070, but the differences really are minimal. In fact, in some regards the mobile product is superior. For example, the total number of CUDA cores increased from 1920 on the desktop to 2048, helping to offset the slight frequency drops. The Base clock dropped from 1506MHz to 1443MHz, but the Boost clock was basically identical, dropping just 38MHz, from 1506MHz to 1443MHz. In the real world, that kind of drop is impossible to notice.

It came with the same chunky 8GB of GDDR5 memory, clocked at an identical 2GHz running over an identical 256-bit memory bus. It also features all of Nvidia’s proprietary technologies that come with the desktop product, such as G-Sync, PhysX, Ansel, DX12 and Vulkan support and the ability to

the 1070 Mobile really hit the sweet spot when it came to price versus performance

power 4K displays at 60Hz over HDMI 2.0b. It’s also fully HDR ready – we just need HDR screens to catch up.

We’ve never had mobile GPUs that are equal to their discrete card-based cousins, but the release of Nvidia’s new mobile chips changed that entirely. Now gamers know what kind of performance difference they can expect between expect between a desktop GTX 1070 and the mobile variant – basically no difference at all. So thank you Nvidia, for finally delivering desktop power to those who need to game on the go.