The gaming industry is rapidly growing, with global revenues expected to rise past $320 billion by 2026. This is no longer a niche hobby exclusive only to the most dedicated gamers who use desktop computers. There are many different ways to step into the amusing realm of gaming. In fact, now it is possible to have the premium gaming experience even on the go. The latest gaming laptops are here with performances that are on par with some of the most advanced desktop systems. Today, gaming laptops come equipped with amazing new features both in terms of external design and what’s under the hood. Sometimes, it can be difficult to wrap your head around all of these improvements when buying a new laptop. Here is everything you need to know before getting one.
Latest GPUs
Arguably, the most important part of a gaming laptop is its graphics card. This is the feature that will singlehandedly give you the best performance in the long run. There are two major graphical unit processor manufacturers to choose from; Nvidia and AMD. Both of these offer cards for just about everyone. However, when buying a laptop, you want to find the model which will deliver the best performance in the long run. Nvidia’s latest 30 series of cards feature cutting edge technology such as DLSS, ray tracing and increased VRAM. All of these are coupled to deliver amazing performance in high resolutions. For instance, the flagship model Nvidia RTX 3080 is capable of 4K gaming at over 100 frames per second. However, there are other great options as well such as RTX 3060 and 3070, which are more budget friendly. The choice of GPU will largely depend on your preferences of in-game settings. Higher shadow resolutions, volumetric lighting and fog, raytracing, and ambient occlusion will all be taxing on your performance, if you do not have a capable card.
More efficient CPUs
Along with a good GPU you want to have a stable CPU as well, since oftentimes a weak processor paired with a powerful graphics card will significantly bottleneck its performance. When it comes to choosing the right CPU, you can opt for either Intel or AMD. Lately, AMD’s Ryzen CPUs have made quite a name for themselves on the market, because of their unique architecture and performance, all with amazing cost-to-value ratio.
Display
People often do not realize that the latest GPUs have become so powerful that standard 60Hz displays are no longer viable. This is simply because users will be missing out on a lot of the added perfomrance that the latest hardware is able to provide with GPUs pushing over 100FPS in most modern titles. That is why new gaming laptops at digiDirect come with displays that go up to 360Hz refresh rate. This will make in-game motions and animations buttery smooth, allowing gamers to have competitive advantage over others in multiplayer online games.
RAM
Having sufficient RAM memory is always important, especially if you intend to multitask on your gaming laptop. For instance, if you want to stream your gameplay, and record all at the same time, you want to make sure that you have plenty of RAM to run all those apps at the same time. There are two main factors to consider, size and number of RAM modules. You want to find a laptop that has at least 16GB or RAM. However, many people make the mistake and find models that have a single stick of RAM that has 16GB. When in reality two sticks of 8GB coupled together, will outperform the single stick variant. This is called running the memory in dual-channel mode, where all of the workload is split across the pair in order to double the speed, and offload each of the two sticks at the same time.
Faster storage
The modern storage solutions have also made laptops very desirable gaming platforms. If there is one thing that makes your user experience on a laptop feel faster, then that is the actual choice of storage type. Previously, people would complain that programs would take forever to open up, and booting up the system felt extremely sluggish, this is because traditional storage comes in the form of spinning hard drives, that rely on mechanical moving parts to read and write data. However, the latest microchips have become a lot more affordable and now it is possible to get an NVMe (nonvolatile memory express) drive. A traditional HDD is capable of 100MB/s speeds, and that can deteriorate with age. Whereas an NVMe drive will go up to 3500Mb/s, with a whopping 35x speed improvement. Make sure that your laptop features this new technology with storage space anywhere close to 1TB if you plan on storing multiple modern-day games.
The gaming industry has evolved to a point where playing video games is absolutely possible on the go using the latest laptops. When buying a new mobile gaming station make sure to watch out for the CPU, GPU, RAM, and the type of display and storage as well.
