Nvidia says 2080 Max-Q faster than next Xbox, PS5

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang showed off the Lenovo Y740 laptop, powered by Nvidia's RTX 2080 Max-Q GPU, at last week's GPU Technology Conference (GTC). The purpose of the presentation was to showcase how the Max-Q tech can bring significant performance improvements to lightweight laptops. One of the more interesting data points in the presentation, however, had Huang comparing the laptop to the upcoming consoles. According to Huang, the 2080 Max-Q-powered laptop will outperform the not-yet-released Xbox and PlayStation 5 consoles.

Huang said during the conference that lightweight gaming laptops are "unquestionably the fastest-growing new gaming platform." Chinese gamers picked up 5 million gaming laptops with Nvidia GPUs powering the graphics, Huang said during the keynote.

There's no doubt that the Max-Q line of graphics cards can push some impressive numbers for how much space and weight the small laptops take up. Max-Q machines are generally pretty performant little workhorses.

There's a lot we don't know

With that said, this is a weird statement for Huang to make. On the one hand, consoles are never going to be faster than the fastest computers. Individual components will continue to improve while consoles stay roughly the same for 6-plus years at a stretch.

At the same time, the new Xbox is said to perform in excess of 12 TFlops. A vanilla RTX 2080 pushes about 10. Max-Q chips, designed to maximize performance in lightweight systems, will be less powerful than that. Further, Nvidia can only completely account for one part of those Max-Q laptops: the graphics card. Some of the biggest jumps in this generation of consoles have nothing to do with the graphics cards. Yes, the RDNA-based cards will be a big jump from the chips in the current consoles, and we'll see AMD implementing features like hardware-accelerated ray tracing. The biggest leaps, though, will come from the "next-gen" NVMe drives and the jump to eight-core CPUs. Consoles are also guaranteed with sport ultra-quick GDDR6 RAM, while these laptops won't necessarily have such speedy RAM.

That's not even mentioning the sharp price difference that will separate the consoles from these laptops.

You can see a bunch of words like "likely" and "not guaranteed" up there because the truth is, we don't know exactly what the exact specs of the upcoming consoles are or what the systems will cost. Huang is making a pretty sloppy statement here in claiming that these systems will be more powerful than next-gen consoles. He doesn't know, we don't know, and it's just not very likely based on what we know right now.

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