The Rise of AI-Powered Gaming Laptops
The in-thing right now in the gaming world is the introduction of AI-powered gaming laptops. Companies like Acer, Dell’s Alienware, Gigabyte, HP, and Lenovo, among several others, have released their own ranges of AI-powered laptops within the last couple of months in India. However, despite the launches happening relatively close together, these laptops vary in how they use AI. While Gigabyte advertises the use of AI in its AORUS series to better understand your habits and optimise the laptop’s performance, Acer’s Predator Helios series uses AI for a myriad of tasks, including using VSR to improve your graphics. What’s the difference? On March 13, Gigabyte announced its AI-powered laptops, the AORUS series. Shortly after, on March 19, Lenovo released an AI-powered range in its Legion series of gaming laptops in India. This was followed by HP, Acer, and Alienware, all releasing their own AI-powered laptops in April for the Indian market. These aren’t the first companies to release AI-powered laptops; they certainly won’t be the last. But what makes them so different? For starters, the AORUS series advertises the use of NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 40 series laptop GPUs, which boosts performance by x20 for GenAI tasks. In terms of usage, though, they also boost several AI features, including AI Boost. According to the company, AI Boost uses Microsoft Azure AI to automatically apply settings that optimise performance based on the game you’re playing. Meanwhile, Lenovo uses its own Lenovo LA AI chips, which last year became the first dedicated AI chip on a gaming laptop. Like AORUS, the chip helps improve the laptop’s performance using Lenovo Vantage. Through Vantage, machine learning software monitors your FPS while gaming and automatically adjusts your settings to ensure better performance. Like the Legion and AORUS laptops, HP’s range of AI-powered laptops uses NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 40 GPUs. Additionally, they include Microsoft Copilot and Intel NPUs. Here, HP’s India Senior Director of Consumer Sales Vineet Gehani emphasised that, alongside improving performance, AI is also used to assess battery life and adjust performance accordingly. However, whether this is a feature in the previous two remains to be seen. Meanwhile, HP also boasts its own audio and video features powered by AI to “improve your calling experience. For instance, even if you are moving around while making a video call, the AI-enhanced features will ensure that your face stays static,” according to Gehani. Similarly, Acer’s Predator Helios series also uses AI to improve its video calling experience, improve eye contact, and reduce noise. Acer also uses NVIDIA’s DLSS 3.5 to upscale the gaming experience, something shared by the other laptops that use NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 40 GPUs. Next comes Alienware’s x16 R2 laptop, which, yet again, uses the same NVIDIA GPUs. You can see where we’re going with this. The laptop advertises mostly the same features – noise reduction, improved gaming performance, improved video and audio calling features, and an upscaled gaming experience. Gamers ♥️ NVIDIA What all these laptops have in common is NVIDIA’s RTX 40 series GPU, first announced in 2022. Following this announcement, most, if not all, companies scrambled to release their latest AI-powered gaming offerings. While some of them seem to have added features, like Lenovo’s AI chips or even Intel NPUs, they mostly rely on the GPUs for what they advertise as their AI-powered series. So, depending on what you’re going for, apart from minor features, it seems like AI usage across brands depends entirely on how the NVIDIA GPUs function. With NVIDIA rumoured to release its RTX 5080 GPUs by the end of this year, we’re likely to see another influx of AI-powered gaming laptops within the next year—at least if the RTX 40 to AI-powered gaming laptop influx timeline is anything to consider. And with the influx of more AI-powered gaming laptops, making a lot of background tasks more manageable, the idea of everyone becoming a gamer inches closer to reality.
We’re likely to see another influx of AI-powered gaming laptops within the next year.
Several companies have released their own ranges of AI-powered laptops within the last couple of months in India.
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Donna is a technology journalist at AIM, hoping to explore AI and its implications in local communities, as well as its intersections with the space, defence, education and civil sectors.