Skip to main content PC Gamer THE GLOBAL AUTHORITY ON PC GAMES Search PC Gamer View Profile Movies & TV Gaming Industry PC Gaming Show Newsletter Signup Community Guidelines Affiliate Links Meet the team About PC Gamer PC Gamer Magazine Subscription Why subscribe? Subscribe to the world's #1 PC gaming mag Try a single issue or save on a subscription Issues delivered straight to your door or device From£35.99View Spring Prime Day Monster Hunter Wilds Marvel Rivals Gaming Laptops The focus on GPU efficiency over fps means this year's gaming laptops are capable of something they've never been good at Dave James 28 March 2025 Big boi gaming laptops with genuine gaming battery life was not what I expected from the class of '25. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Future) Dave James, efficient gamer (Image credit: Future) This month I have been mostly... up to my eyeballs in graphics cards and gaming laptops. You tell a 15-year-old Dave that and he would have exploded with glee. Which would have been messy. 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. Image 1 of 3 (Image credit: Future) (Image credit: Future) (Image credit: Future) 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. The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brandsReceive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsorsBy submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. 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. Social Links Navigation Editor-in-Chief, Hardware Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck. You must confirm your public display name before commenting Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name. 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