NVIDIA GeForce RTX Mobility Turing GPU Family Rumored To Launch At CES 2019

It feels crazy to us that the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas is once again right around the corner (next month, in fact), but here we are, just weeks away. That means the rumors and speculation are starting to flow, with regards to what CES might bring. Accordingly, there is talk of NVIDIA launching its mobile RTX GPUs at or just before the convention.

One thing we can reasonable assume is that NVIDIA will eventually port its Turing GPUs with dedicated real-time ray tracing hardware baked inside over to mobile, after having already launched Turing on the desktop. Will it actually happen at CES, though? We can't say for certain, though as the rumor goes, NVIDIA's RTX Mobility series will launch on January 6, which is actually a couple days before CES officially kicks off.

It's also said the embargo on RTX Mobility will lift on January 26, nearly three weeks after the unveiling. Presumably, that's when review sites will be able to publish performance numbers and other details that may not have been announced at CES.

If that's truly the case, then NVIDIA and its OEM system partners might already be sampling laptops with RTX Mobility GPUs inside. That also means there will likely be leaked benchmarks ahead of CES, as typically happens in the lead up to new product announcements. As always, we'll be taking those with a grain of salt—it's never certain if leaks are legitimate, and even if they are, you have to factor in pre-release drivers that may not be fully optimized. Case in point, NVIDIA and Dice collaborated on a recently released GPU driver update and Battlefield V game patch that purportedly improves ray-tracing performance by up to 50 percent.

In any event, Turing in mobile form might be just around the bend. If you're in the market for a new laptop, you may want to wait a bit, even if you're not interested in Turing. There could very well be sales on older laptops with Pascal GPUs inside as vendors look to clear out their old inventories to make room for the new stuff.

On the other hand, if you're in dire need of a laptop, be aware that waiting is a gamble. It's not a given that Turing will launch in mobile form at CES, or that products will be available around that time. After all, it was rumored back in September that a GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q mobile GPU was weeks away from launch, and that turned out to be false.