I love a big bulky graphics card, but I think Nvidia's RTX 50-series may be the last of its kind

I know that with a headline this inflammatory, there are going to be some rather angry PC gamers. But bear with me, as I have no beef with dedicated GPUs. They fuel all of the games I play religiously on my gaming PC.

However, when it comes to the best gaming laptops, the advancements in the graphical prowess of all-in-one chipsets, and the rumors of everything that’s coming as soon as CES 2025, you start to realize there could be a better option brewing — an option that could make the idea of a dedicated GPU redundant after the RTX 50-series.

Not only that, but with AI-driven technologies like DLSS enabling impressive visual fidelity and smoothness on even dirt cheap RTX 4050 gaming laptops, the opportunity is there for something that can give you stellar gaming while preserving more of that precious battery life.

“Integrated” is not a dirty word anymore

Let’s unpack what we’re hearing ahead of CES 2025. Over the past few months, there’s been some big developments in integrated graphics from both Intel and AMD. With a little tweaking of in-game settings, you can get AAA games running at 1080p with impressive visual fidelity at over 60 FPS or more.

And in just a few weeks, it’s looking likely that we’ll see this go further. The benchmarks of AMD’s leaked Strix Halo APU shows graphical capabilities that are actually more powerful than the RTX 4060. On top of that, Intel is rumored to bring 22 new chips to Vegas too, and you can bet your bottom dollar that Team Blue will also have some GPU advancements too.

And even Apple is getting in on the party. I’ve been waiting for years for the Cupertino crew to care about gaming, and M4-powered machines running a bunch of games doesn’t disappoint. I mean Cyberpunk 2077 is coming!

Yes, we are at the beginning of this gap closing between integrated and dedicated graphics, but from this point, the clock is ticking.

Dedicated to a niche

I’m not saying there isn’t a place for dedicated graphics cards. Integrated graphics may be getting damn good, but they’re still a ways off. Not only that, but having a separate unit doing all of those visual calculations will always deliver superior visual fidelity at the cost of its far greater power demands.

That’s where I believe these cards will become more and more niche. Because of the advancements in the recently leaked DLSS 4, or AMD’s FSR or Intel’s XeSS, you could easily get a stellar enough experience for most gamers. But the niche that needs that raw processing power of graphics entirely on the card could very well get smaller and smaller.

But first, there’s the pesky thing of these companies agreeing on one shared frame generation standard, so they can work toward one common goal.

It’s almost time for an Nvidia APU

So no, dedicated GPUs are not dead yet. And in all honesty, I still think there’s going to be a dedicated niche to the dedicated card. (Did I say “dedicated” enough yet?) But in a few years, we could see parity in performance between a gaming laptop with GPU and an APU.

But Nvidia’s not daft, and chances are the company has already been thinking about this. I hope that thinking is pointing toward them entering the CPU battle, because just imagine what that could mean… not just gaming laptops with vastly longer battery life, but even gaming handhelds with DLSS.

The more I think about this inflection point, the more excited I get about the idea of it.

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