Laptop & Desktop Graphics Comparison

I’ve tested 34 GPUs from laptops and desktops in 25 games at 1080p, 1440p and 4K resolutions. Simply click on one of the tabs below to view the results for a specific game.

Details about the hardware used in the test PC and specific gaming laptop models can be found below.

Upscaling was not used. Ray tracing was only enabled in The Witcher 3 and Metro Exodus Enhanced.

These results are the averages from all 20+ games tested. There are fewer games included at lower resolutions as lower end GPUs could not run some games due to VRAM limits.

1080p 1440p 4K
1080p 1440p 4K
1080p 1440p 4K
1080p 1440p 4K
This game has a 240 FPS frame cap. This is why GPUs that hit this limit at 1080p have lower 1% lows compared to lower GPUs.

1080p 1440p 4K
1080p 1440p 4K
This is another game where the 1% lows really suffer on laptops compared to desktops.

1080p 1440p 4K
This is one of the few games where GPUs with 6GB of VRAM or less cannot run the highest "ultra nightmare" setting preset, hence the 0 results. It's also another example of much worse 1% lows from the laptops.

1080p 1440p 4K
1080p 1440p 4K
1080p 1440p 4K
1080p 1440p 4K
1080p 1440p 4K
1080p 1440p 4K
1080p 1440p 4K
1080p 1440p 4K
1080p 1440p 4K
1080p 1440p 4K
1080p 1440p 4K
1080p 1440p 4K
1080p 1440p 4K
1080p 1440p 4K
1080p 1440p 4K
1080p 1440p 4K
1080p 1440p 4K
Due to either a bug, bottleneck, or just how ray tracing was implemented, we found lots of GPUs maxing out at 30 FPS. This is most obvious at 4K.

1080p 1440p 4K

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Accuracy Disclaimer

This data is not perfectly fairly comparable, and should instead be used as a rough guideline.

Each GPU takes us about 12 hours to test in 25 games at multiple resolutions, meaning total testing time was more than 400 hours, or 5 weeks non-stop with 12 hour days to test all 34 GPUs.

As this was not the only project I was working on, it took about 4 months to complete all of this testing, plenty of time for various games to get updated.

That said, when I noticed an update that affected performance I retested GPUs for accuracy, which further added more testing time. However, for laptops in particular, I do not get to hold onto these for long periods of time, so was limited in retesting some.

Drivers were another problem. Some graphics cards like the RTX 4060 launched in the middle of testing and required an updated driver to work at all, so this may differ a bit too with newer released GPUs.

Ultimately, the overall averages should be good enough for you to get a good understanding of where laptop and desktop GPUs fit in against each other as we’re averaging 20+ games. But specific game FPS results in newer titles that still receive performance updates may vary slightly.

But You’re Missing a GPU!

If a specific GPU is missing, the simple answer is that I was not able to get my hands on it for testing. I did the best I can, but I could not get some older models such as 6800 XT or the laptop RTX 3070.

Desktop PC Specs

Here are the specs of the PC that all of the graphics cards were tested in. No manual overclocking was done, consider all results stock. You can check the prices of specific components with these affiliate links:

Gaming Laptops Tested

Here are all of the gaming laptops that were used for each GPU. Please note that performance will vary between laptops with the same GPU depending on things like thermals, power limits, and more. Each link below is an affiliate link you can use to check current price and availability.

Water cooling doesn’t make too much difference to the RTX 4070/4080/4090 results, but it does help. This data was collected for other content, and given the small difference in performance I chose not to retest those 3 GPUs in 25 games at 3 resolutions on air. We can instead just consider them to represent best case laptops.

You can find reviews for most of these gaming laptops on my YouTube channel.