NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4090 Mobile GPU Crushes Last-Gen Flagship In Benchmark Leak
Unless the mountains of leaks and rumors are all wrong, NVIDIA will unveil its initial lineup of GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs for laptops at its GeForce Beyond event just days before the Consumer Electronics Show officially begins next week. That will presumably include its upcoming flagship mobile GPU, the GeForce RTX 4090. As we wait for an official unveiling, some specs and performance data have leaked out, giving us a glimpse of what lurks around the corner.
Interestingly, NVIDIA never released a mobile GeForce RTX 3090 for laptops, even though there is a desktop variant (as well as a GeForce RTX 3090 Ti). Instead, the fastest mobile GPU on the planet for gamers is the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, which sports 7,424 CUDA cores, 16GB of GDDR6 memory piping data through a 256-bit bus width, a configurable boost clock range of 1,125MHz to 1,590MHz, and a configurable power envelope of 80W to 150W.
It's a beastly laptop GPU for sure, but if an early benchmark reveal is any indication, it's about to be slaughtered by its next-gen replacement. There's a listing that appears on Geekbench that highlights a few core specifications of the upcoming GeForce RTX 4090 in mobile form, along with an OpenCL score to make some rough comparisons. Have a look...
Source: Geekbench
The listing simply points to a "Notebook X370SNx" model, which could be a reference platform for testing (or something else). Assuming the specs have not been spoofed, it sports an Intel Core i9-13900HX processor, 32GB of RAM, and a GeForce RTX 4090 laptop GPU.
Looking at the GPU section, the GeForce RTX 4090 is revealed to wield 76 compute units, which works out to 9,728 CUDA cores. That's the same core makeup as the desktop GeForce RTX 4080 that's armed with an ADA103 GPU. Likewise, the mobile GPU is also shown with 16GB of memory, though it's probably GDDR6 instead of GDDR6X as found on the desktop 4080 part.
Source: Geekbench
The listing also shows a 2,040MHz boost clock. For reference, the desktop 4080 boosts to 2,505MHz. We anticipate NVIDIA will stick with its formula of enabling its hardware partners to configure its mobile GPUs to different specs and power envelopes, but in this particular configuration (of which we don't know the TGP), it posted a 210,290 OpenCL score on Geekbench.
We don't want to get overly excited about an OpenCL benchmark run, let alone a leak. But hey, it's what we have to work with at the moment. To put that score into perspective, Geekbench lists the average OpenCL score for mobile GeForce RTX 3080 Ti at 136,008. Compared to that figure, the mobile GeForce RTX 4090 scored 54.6 percent higher.
As is always the case, the mobile SKU trails its desktop namesake. According to Geekbench, the average OpenCL score for a desktop GeForce RTX 4080 is 266,376, which is 27.7 percent higher than the leaked mobile score.
Overall, this is an impressive early showing for NVIDIA's next flagship laptop GPU. We'll have to see if it holds up to a wider set of benchmarking, as well as where the power draw ends up and, related, what kind of cooling is needed to tame this beast. Stay tuned.
