24 PCWorld MAY 2020NEWS NVIDIA LEVELS UP GEFORCE GAMING LAPTOPS
efficiencies
introduced by DLSS
2.0, a game-specific
Nvidia technology
(go.pcworld.com/
dls2) that developers
need to implement
manually. Nvidia
claims DLSS 2.0 can
boost battery life by
up to 20 percent
during gaming, but
it’s in only four games
at this time. Even so, DLSS 2.0 is exciting stuff,
and the other Max-Q upgrades are also well
worth getting excited about.
Let’s start at the lowest level before
digging into the really juicy stuff. These new
Max-Q GPUs include lower-voltage GDDR6
memory as well as “next-gen” voltage
regulators to improve overall efficiency. Mark
Aevermann, Nvidia’s laptop product
manager, said that of the 80 watts of powerfinally making gaming laptops at least
somewhat portable to outright svelte (case in
point: the new Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (see
page 47). Max-Q GPUs ship with lowered
clock speeds and power draws than their
full-fat, non-Max-Q laptop cousins, and
include other tweaks to improve power
efficiency.
As of April 2, Nvidia’s rolling out fresh
enhancements that will be included in
GeForce notebooks going forward. The
company claims that
with these
improvements in
place, new Max-Q
laptops are twice as
efficient as
comparable last-gen
models from 2017.
That’s a bit of a
wishy-washy number
because it includes