The focus on GPU efficiency over fps means this year's gaming laptops are capable of something they've never been good at

Mobile gaming is no longer the sole preserve of the Steam Deck, ROG Ally X, and they're assorted handheld PC brethren. The old guard of portable PC playtimes is actually making a genuine pitch for gaming on the go. It's 2025 and finally gaming laptops can actually be used away from a plug socket.

Thanks to the newly efficient Nvidia RTX Blackwell mobile GPUs, we're at a stage now where we can actually play games on our high-performance notebooks without draining the battery in a blink of an eye. Before now, gaming laptops might have come with hoofing great batteries, but the power-sucking nature of our mobile GPUs was such that there was little hope of being able to get more than a tenth of the way through the tutorials in Red Dead Redemption 2 before the juice ran dry.

It might seem an oddity that a gaming laptop—by definition a mobile device—hasn't before really been a PC that was capable of actually playing games reasonably well without being plugged into a wall socket. But this is truly where we've been for more than twenty years.

The first gaming laptop is widely credited to Alienware, from way back in 2002. It was hot, power-hungry and didn't last long running purely off its battery. And they barely changed one iota in the intervening years. Sure, it's become possible to get a little more time out of your expensive gaming laptop if you limit everything to the lowest possible settings and run at 30 fps, but even then you're not going to get a whole heap of good game time.

The new version of BatteryBoost baked into the Nvidia App for the RTX Blackwell GPUs still does a kinda similar thing, in that it will far-too-aggressively crush your in-game settings if you let it, but it also has some funky things that make gaming on battery a go-er. It's that scene-aware algorithm that makes the difference in games themselves.

This is the feature which admittedly ruined Football Manager for me on the Razer Blade 16's RTX 5090 and forced me to run it on the integrated AMD 890M iGPU, but for other games it works a treat. The new target for BatteryBoost is 60 fps, but for low-action parts of a game the feature is able to parse that and drop the frame rate target down to 30 fps for the duration, before ramping back up again when the action starts again.

This happens in things like dialogue exchanges or when you're doing a ton of inventory management in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 or Grey Zone Warfare. And it works really, really well. Except in Football Manager where it thinks every part of the game is low action.

Seriously, there's no way you can tell me my academy graduate scoring a worldie from outside the box away to Napoli in the Champion's League is not action. Screw you, Nvidia.

FM aside, I've been happily playing on battery—without letting the Nvidia App optimise the settings and mess things up—and just relying on the algorithm to cut fps where it's not needed. The new efficiency features of the RTX Blackwell architecture then come and give their own aid to squeeze out more game time from a high-performance gaming laptop. These new chips can shut entire sections of the GPU down, and separate out the memory components, too. And it's much quicker at moving between these states as well—it's also much quicker at shifting clock speeds which can save a huge amount of power.

And, in all honesty, this is not really what I had on my bingo card for this year; actually being able to run a proper gaming laptop on battery and it not be a terrible experience.

So, kudos to Nvidia. I've seen it working well in both the Razer RTX 5090 machine I've tested and the Gigabyte RTX 5080 system I've moved on to. And er, good job, too, because without this efficiency peg to hang the RTX Blackwell hat on, I'm not entirely sure what else it had going for it. Especially given the public reception to Multi Frame Gen. These chips are not much quicker than the previous generation when it comes to games, certainly not significantly so.

And that might end up being a bit of an issue for this generation of gaming laptop. With no extra raw performance numbers to entice folk, and a general public that has rarely shown a ton of interest in efficiency over frame rates, the reception might end up being rather frosty.

But I am definitely here for the ability to not have to always search around for a plug socket for my laptop if I want to play some games. Here's to battery gaming, then.