Nvidia made some fundamental changes with their GeForce RTX 30-series chips that made buying a gaming laptop much harder, but now the company is taking steps to fix the biggest issue. Going forward, Nvidia will require laptop makers to reveal the power and clock speed details for the GeForce GPU inside each system, along with supported Max-Q technologies, the company told PCWorld.

It’s a big deal. With the RTX 30-series, Nvidia transitioned its “Max-Q” name away from signaling that a gaming laptop uses a more efficient (but less powerful) version of a graphics chip. Now, Max-Q is an umbrella term for a wide variety of power-saving technologies, such as Dynamic Boost 2.0, Whisper Mode 2.0, Advanced Optimus, and Resizable BAR support. They’re all exciting features, but the muddying of the Max-Q waters makes it more difficult to know if a given gaming notebook is running a slower, low-power GeForce GPU, or a faster full-force version pumped full of wattage. We’ve already witnessed up to a 25 percent performance difference between RTX 3080 laptops with low- and high-power versions in our tests.

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