Nvidia Releasing GeForce RTX 2050 Laptops in 2022

In Nvidia’s latest press release, the company revealed its plans to deliver more affordable mobile gaming options for laptops. Surprisingly, besides MX550 and MX570, the company will include RTX 2050 in its offer. Nvidia expects these GPUs to appear in laptops set to release in spring of 2022 (or autumn, if you’re in the southern hemisphere).

The release of the upcoming RTX 2050 laptops shows that the company isn’t yet planning to discontinue the RTX 20 series, especially with the recent re-release of RTX 2060 graphics cards with high VRAM capacity.

While some criticism could be pointed at Nvidia for not releasing a product from the latest series of GPUs, it’s worth mentioning that RTX 2050 isn’t actually based on old hardware tech. Unlike other RTX 20 chips, the RTX 2050 is built on the Ampere GA107 rather than any Turing technology. Other RTX 30 cards, including RTX 3050, are built on the same foundation, and it could potentially bring better ray-tracing performance for the RTX 2050, although with its specs, we wouldn’t advise turning this option on.

RTX 2050 is packing 4 GB of GDDR6 memory at 14 Gbps and 2,048 CUDA cores with a boost clock of up to 1477 MHz - the same specs included in the existing RTX 3050. The main difference is that RTX 3050 comes with a 128-bit memory bus, while the more affordable RTX 2050 has a 64-bit bus. Because of the thermal design power (TDP) of 30 to 45 W, it won’t require extensive cooling. It’s puzzling why Nvidia didn’t brand this mobile GPU as RTX 3040, though, considering it’s effectively just a scaled-down 3050.

Nvidia didn’t go into more details on the MX550 and MX570 mobile graphics chips, besides stating that they will have more CUDA cores and better memory speeds. However, it’s more than likely that MX550 will be built on Turing and MX570 on Ampere-based architecture.