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Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has boasted once again the success of Team Green鈥檚 Max-Q laptops and assorted dedicated mobile graphics processors. This time though, he’s got the consoles in his sights.
鈥淥ur notebook business has seen double-digit growth for eight consecutive quarters and this is unquestionably a new gaming category,鈥?/span> said Jensen during Nvidia鈥檚 Q4 quarterly earnings call.
鈥淟ike it鈥檚 a new game console. This is going to be the largest game console in the world I believe. And the reason for that is because there are more people with laptops than there are of any other device.鈥?/span>
He鈥檚 just wilfully ignoring smartphones, right?
鈥淎nd so the fact that we鈥檝e been able to get RTX into a thin and light notebook, a thin and light notebook is really a breakthrough,鈥?Jensen continued. 鈥淎nd it鈥檚 one of the reasons why we鈥檙e seeing such great success in the notebook.鈥?/span>
While Huang is obviously right to be shouting about the capabilities of gaming laptops powered by GeForce graphics, I think we鈥檙e a long way off ever conceiving of them as genuine competitors in the 鈥榗onsole鈥?marketplace. We鈥檙e talking about two completely different price brackets and, in a lot of cases, totally different use cases. You can pick up a Nintendo Switch Lite for $170; no decent gaming laptop is getting anywhere near this. You鈥檙e looking at $1000 as a minimum for a decent gaming laptop, which already puts it well outside the comfortable value for a portable gaming device for most people in the world.
The saving grace of such a laptop, naturally, is that it can do a whole lot more besides gaming, but that鈥檚 all by the by when we鈥檙e talking about a strict competitor in the console business.
Sadly, Nvidia doesn鈥檛 release sales figures for specific GPUs, although we鈥檇 certainly be interested to know just how many GeForce RTX Mobile graphics cards it鈥檚 shifted. Unit sales have seemingly increased significantly since the arrival of the GeForce Max-Q design, despite the significant performance hit.聽
It鈥檚 certainly intriguing to see this renewed focus on mobile gaming from Nvidia, it鈥檚 evidently an approach that鈥檚 working for it. Whether that can be enough to topple the 106 million PS4 consoles sold remains to be seen, but while traditional PC sales decline, laptops continue to boom, driven by 12.7% year-on-year growth.
What do you think, can laptop gaming topple console gaming?