Looks like the latest Nvidia driver has given some RTX 5080 and 5090 laptops a little performance boost

If you're lucky enough to have your hands on an RTX 50-series gaming laptop, you might be in store for a small performance boost Well, actually, you've probably already received it if you keep your graphics drivers up to date, because this boost comes in the form of a fix packaged in with the latest Nvidia driver.

The fix is packaged in the latest 576.52 GeForce Game Ready Driver, released just a couple of days ago. According to Nvidia (via VideoCardz), what's now fixed was a previous issue that meant the "GeForce RTX 50 series [notebook GPU] TGP limit may be clipped earlier."

This is strange phrasing, but it essentially means that there was previously a problem with RTX 50-series mobile GPUs getting up to their maximum rated TGPs, ie, their maximum power draw.

The RTX 5090's TGP, for instance, is rated up to a base 150 W but should be able to reach 175 W with Dynamic Boost by shifting power from the CPU to the GPU when needed, such as when gaming in a GPU-bound game.

In practice, however, we at PC Gamer and some others found the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 never actually hit 175 W at any point. This, of course, translates to extra game performance being left on the shelf, untapped.

(Image credit: Future)

The latest drivers, according to the forum post, even if not the official release notes (fixed it on the sly, huh, Nvidia?), seem to have fixed this problem, removing unnecessary throttles from the GPUs living up to their promised max potential.

Of course, this doesn't mean that every laptop with an RTX 5080 or RTX 5090 inside will be able to hit it—much will depend on the laptop form factor and thermals. It's doubtful whether the Razer Blade 16 2025, for instance, and despite it being in our view the best gaming laptop right now, will be able to hit it due to how slim it is. There are already reports of this driver update improving things slightly, though, which is a good sign.

We've had a good time with RTX 50-series laptops in general so far—which isn't to say they're all worthwhile buys, especially in this market—so here's to the icing on the cake, I guess.