Playing your favorite PC games with settings maxed out doesn’t mean you need a big desktop rig. We’ve got a top-rated gaming laptop for every type of user, based on our in-depth reviews.
Purists will argue that you need a PC to truly play games, especially if you’re a fan of pushing the levels of graphics quality beyond the capabilities of a mere gaming console. To do that, the gaming desktop is still king, particularly when it comes to having the kind of components and horsepower needed to run 4K games smoothly and support virtual reality (VR) setups. But if you want or need something you can tote around the house or over to your friend’s place, we’re here to help you choose the right gaming laptop.
Our list of picks is ever-evolving as we test new models. We have organized our choices into our current favorites in the budget (under about $1,200), midrange (between budget and $2,000), and high-end ($2,000 and up) categories at each of the two major gaming-laptop screen sizes (15-inch and 17-inch). Smaller 14-inch gaming laptops fall into the “ultraportable gaming” class, and we’ve also designated a few additional favorites for areas such as overall value and unusual designs (such as twin-screen models). On occasion, we may designate a model in a different price class than what we tested it at, if the base model starts at a lower price.
Also note that the budget class saw some price inflation through 2021 into 2022, given the silicon shortages and supply-chain issues that have plagued the industry since the pandemic began. Before, we’d have set a hard limit of $999 for budget gaming machines, but we are seeing price rises at the lower end of this market. So we’ve lifted the price ceiling for this class of gaming machines.How to Buy a Gaming Laptop
Gaming systems have higher-end components than run-of-the-mill consumer laptops, so their prices consequently will be higher, but the range across the category is huge: from under a grand to $4,000 and up. Budget gaming laptops start at around $750 and can go up to about $1,250. For that, you get a system that can play games at full HD resolution (1080p) with the settings turned down in most titles, or at maximum quality settings in simpler games. Storage may be a hard drive, or more likely, a modest-capacity solid-state drive (SSD). An SSD as the boot drive is always preferable, and nowadays, hard drives have mostly been relegated to secondary drives in larger laptops.
Want something better? Midrange systems give you smoother gameplay at high or maximum settings on a better-quality 1080p screen (which will support high refresh rates; more on that in a moment), and should add support for VR headsets. These models will range in price from around $1,250 to $2,000.
High-end systems, meanwhile, should guarantee you smooth gameplay at 1080p with graphics details maxed out, invariably on a high-refresh screen. They even might let you play at 4K resolution, if the screen supports it. A high-end model should also be able to power a VR headset and support additional external monitors. These machines tend to come with speedy storage components such as PCI Express solid-state drives, and they are priced above $2,000, often closer to $3,000.
Some laptops in this class support QHD (2,560-by-1,440-pixel) or 4K screens, a hard drive to supplement the SSD, and ultra-efficient cooling fans as optional extras. Thanks to modern advancements, an increasing number of these are even fairly thin and portable. With laptops in this tier, you’ll either pay a premium for high-end performance in a thin chassis, or for pay for the most possible power in a chunkier build.Put the GPU First: Which Gaming Laptop Graphics to Get?
The main attribute that makes or breaks a gaming laptop is its graphics processing unit (GPU). We don’t consider a laptop to be a gaming laptop unless it has a discrete graphics chip from Nvidia or (less commonly) AMD.
A quick crash course for the uninitiated: In general, the higher the number in a GPU series, the more powerful it is. For example, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 will generally produce higher frame rates and higher-quality graphics than an RTX 3070, and so on down the stack, while the “30” denotes the generation. Nvidia is the dominant player in the field right now, currently producing discrete mobile GPUs based its “Ampere” microarchitecture. Ampere GPUs sell under the GeForce RTX 30-Series name (i.e., the RTX 3070 or RTX 3080) and originally launched on laptops in early 2021.
This platform supplanted the previous “Turing” (20 Series) generation, and you will rarely see these 20-Series GPUs (for example, the RTX 2070) in 2022. They may appear in past laptops that are still in stock at some online retailers, but you won’t find them in new systems. Unlike prior generations, the top-end GPUs available on new laptops carry an “RTX” designation rather than “GTX,” a nod to the ray-tracing technology that the platform offers for enhanced in-game visuals (with games that support it).
Ampere laptop GPUs are not 1:1 performers in line with their desktop counterparts, but performance is still very strong, and they’re more capable of ray-tracing than Turing. With Ampere, though, we’ve found that there can be some sizable performance variance between the same GPU in one laptop versus that same GPU in another depending on the power that laptop makers deliver to the GPU. To see our findings on why this is, read our mobile Ampere testing article. This makes laptop shopping a bit more complicated than going by just the GPU name on paper. Our individual testing of each system is more important than ever.
Nvidia also upped the ante for high-end laptop GPUs at CES 2022 with the RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti. We’ve reviewed just a few systems with these so far, but like the RTX 2070 Super and RTX 2080 Super, they inch the power ceilings ever higher from the base GPUs, and allow laptop makers to pick even more granular performance and price points for different systems.
Now, let’s move down the power hierarchy a bit. The distinctly midrange RTX 3060 occupies the space just under the RTX 3070 and 3080, at the bottom of the 30 Series stack, are the GeForce RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti, which launched in spring 2021. Joining these is the newly announced RTX 2050, filling out the middle ground between these and the previous generation. That’s a bit out of the ordinary, but its last-generation name and strange timing reflects supply shortages for 30 Series GPUs.
Compared with the premium RTX 3070 and RTX 3080, these GPUs are available in budget-friendlier gaming laptops (or in the base configurations of more premium machines), bringing Ampere architecture and, crucially, ray-tracing to entry-level machines. (See our primer on ray-tracing on the PC.)
Below the RTX 3050 are the GeForce GTX GPUs mentioned earlier. These are GPUs without the ability for ray-tracing, based on Turing architecture, including the GTX 1650, GTX 1650 Ti, and GTX 1660 Ti. These still offer good full HD/1080p gaming performance, cutting costs by dropping GeForce RTX-specific features like ray-tracing. (We’ll get into this a bit more below in the cheap gaming laptops section, where it’s most relevant.)
These GTX GPUs are older and less potent, but not yet irrelevant. The lowest-end gaming laptops, or non-gaming systems that want to provide some discrete GPU power, are still releasing with these GPUs, but the GeForce RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti will replace them in most cheap gaming laptops going forward. You will also see, for example, the GTX 1650 Ti employed in small gaming laptops like the Razer Blade Stealth 13, and in non-gaming laptops that can benefit from some graphics oomph, like the Dell XPS 15.
Nvidia is still the main player in graphics, but chief rival AMD is seeing an increase in adoption. A rising number of gaming laptops offer Radeon RX 5000 or 6000 Series GPUs. Radeon GPUs are sometimes paired with an Intel processor, though we’re also seeing more frequent examples of AMD graphics combined with AMD processors than before. (Dell and MSI, for example, were offering a few AMD-on-AMD CPU/GPU machines.) The latest are GPUs like the Radeon RX 6800M, RX 6700M, and RX 6600M, but we’ve still only seen and tested them in a handful of systems, like the MSI Delta 15.
Even with all the above complexity, we can still draw some basic conclusions about graphics performance. In 2022, a single midrange or high-end discrete GPU will let you play the latest AAA gaming titles on a 1080p screen with most of the bells and whistles turned on, and be fine for powering VR play. The RTX 3070 and 3080 have made smooth 1440p gaming the norm, and the latter GPU especially has made even 4K gaming on laptops much more plausible than before.
Combined with a rendering technique called DLSS, the high-end GPUs are even able to push ray-tracing at higher resolutions in some titles.
