With text on a slide, as part of a presentation by NVIDIA boss Jen-Hsun Huang, stating that an RTX 2080 (in gaming laptop form) is "> Next Gen Console" - as in more powerful than the upcoming PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. With both consoles featuring custom AMD graphics hardware that will support real-time ray-tracing this was a weird way to draw attention to the growing market of portable high-end gaming laptops.

Which NVIDIA notes is one of the fastest growing sectors for the industry, that has in recent years benefited from high-end graphics performance similar to that of a full-sized desktop.



"Gaming requires powerful PCs and powerful PCs tend to be large. When we started working on gaming notebooks they were quite large so that the GPUs, which are very powerful, requires a lot of thermal and electricity, and therefore the systems tend to be quite large," Huang said. "We've made it possible to put the highest end GPUs into sleek, beautiful, gaming notebooks."

With these comments made at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in China, it was definitely weird to slip the whole more powerful than a next-gen console line in one of the slides. For one, it's probably not true - in the sense that games developed for console tend to get better performance based on static hardware. The fact that Red Dead Redemption II runs in 4K on an Xbox One X is still impressive.

On the other hand taking a look at the pricing of current high-end RTX cards - one would think that the PS5 and Xbox Series X would struggle in direct performance comparisons. In the end this is probably NVIDIA throwing shade at AMD, who despite releasing the impressive Radeon RX series this year has yet to directly compete with NVIDIA when it comes to a new high-end GPU.