Lenovo warns of potential RTX 5050 mobile GPU price hike — budget mobile Blackwell GPU rumored to co-exist with the RTX 4050

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If you want a budget Blackwell laptop next year, prepare to spend a bit more.

Nvidia GeForce RTX Laptop
(Image credit: Nvidia)

Rumor has it that Nvidia is eying to operate sales for the RTX 4050 mobile in tandem with the upcoming RTX 5050 - hinting towards a potential price bump for budget Blackwell mobile GPUs per Lenovo's Product Manager at Weibo (via WCCFTech). The leak also explicitly states that all other RTX 40 mobile (Ada Lovelace) offerings will be discontinued - and replaced by respective RTX 50 (Blackwell) counterparts.

The flagship RTX 50 GPUs will be unveiled at CES 2025, but mobile variants, as is tradition, might launch by Computex 2025 or later. Even so, be prepared to pay a pretty penny, as Lenovo's Product Manager at Weibo asserts that the RTX 4050 laptop/mobile will coexist with the RTX 5050 once it launches.

Per the source, laptops with the newer variant might be priced higher as Nvidia looks to reposition Blackwell in its product stack. Since the Lenovo representative cannot access internal pricing numbers, this may be a hypothetical assumption. Alternatively, RTX 4050-equipped laptops could go down in price, but that's mere conjecture.

Nvidia RTX 5050 confirmation

(Image credit: Weibo)

This is not the first time we've heard such rumors. A prior report from Clevo suggested that Nvidia will continue offering the RTX 3050 6GB mobile alongside the RTX 4050 6GB mobile into 2025 - and the RTX 2050 4GB will see a replacement in the shape of the RTX 3050 4GB - the latter has a wider 128-bit memory bus.

Under the "GN22-X2" GPU ID, the RTX 5050 mobile is expected to employ the GB207 GPU and 8GB of GDDR7 VRAM. Regarding memory, the premier Blackwell-mobile RTX 5090 mobile allegedly retains a 16GB VRAM configuration - similar to the RTX 5080 mobile and the last-gen RTX 4090 mobile.

Nvidia plans to position Blackwell as the premium offering next year, with last-gen counterparts targeted at budget laptops. This is similar to Intel's approach with its Core 200 CPU family, which uses Alder Lake silicon under the hood.

The RTX 50 "Blackwell" series should be revealed at the upcoming CES 2025 event in January, alongside AMD's Radeon RX 8000 "RDNA 4" GPUs. We anticipate Blackwell mobile being announced at Computex, and it should appear on laptops shortly after.

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Hassam Nasir
Hassam Nasir
Contributing Writer

Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.

15 Comments Comment from the forums
  • subspruce
    This is certainly a place N44 bins could shimmy into if AMD wanted to
    Reply
  • Giroro
    RTX 5050 might be the exact same chip as 4050, coexisting with the 4050 Max-Q. We don't know.

    Or maybe it will be multiple different old chips all called RTX 5050, with wildly different performance levels. Or maybe a RTX 5050 mobile won't be released and they'll just rename their lowest-end design to RTX 5060 Ti Mobile at the last minute. Who knows. It's Nvidia.
    All we know is that they don't want to make new gaming chips because of the opportunity cost, so prices for everything they make will go up (probably even their old chips) when they release the next gen.... if they even bother releasing a next gen.

    What are you going to do about it?
    Reply
  • DS426
    No problem, nVidia will still make their revenue gains while AMD might gain tens of sales worldwide from this situation.

    Everybody wants green, so that's ya'lls problem.
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    DS426 said:
    Everybody wants green, so that's ya'lls problem.
    not really. people want performance for their perceived money value.

    If next AMD gpu's are 4080 ish at price of a 4070 many people would switch so long as performance is there. (and if FSR4 is better which should as isn't the rumor of it being more liek dlss?)

    fsr 3 is bad (by comparison) and rt performance on amd is worse. if they fix those issues nvidia loses the benefits apart from the HALO tier buyers.
    Reply
  • excalibur1814
    This is simple. They put the (planned) price up, don't buy them. The prices will soon fall.

    But we don't do that, as we continue to put up with fake rises. Same for phones and tablets. Profits keep increasing.
    Reply
  • subspruce
    Giroro said:
    RTX 5050 might be the exact same chip as 4050, coexisting with the 4050 Max-Q. We don't know.

    Or maybe it will be multiple different old chips all called RTX 5050, with wildly different performance levels. Or maybe a RTX 5050 mobile won't be released and they'll just rename their lowest-end design to RTX 5060 Ti Mobile at the last minute. Who knows. It's Nvidia.
    All we know is that they don't want to make new gaming chips because of the opportunity cost, so prices for everything they make will go up (probably even their old chips) when they release the next gen.... if they even bother releasing a next gen.

    What are you going to do about it?
    If Nvidia doesn't launch, N44 and N48 will be way better positioned to launch

    hotaru251 said:
    not really. people want performance for their perceived money value.

    If next AMD gpu's are 4080 ish at price of a 4070 many people would switch so long as performance is there. (and if FSR4 is better which should as isn't the rumor of it being more liek dlss?)

    fsr 3 is bad (by comparison) and rt performance on amd is worse. if they fix those issues nvidia loses the benefits apart from the HALO tier buyers.
    In that situation Nvidia would paper launch a 5070 mobile to discourage AMD buyers
    Reply
  • Pierce2623
    hotaru251 said:
    not really. people want performance for their perceived money value.

    If next AMD gpu's are 4080 ish at price of a 4070 many people would switch so long as performance is there. (and if FSR4 is better which should as isn't the rumor of it being more liek dlss?)

    fsr 3 is bad (by comparison) and rt performance on amd is worse. if they fix those issues nvidia loses the benefits apart from the HALO tier buyers.
    That’s assuming most buy Nvidia because of ray tracing and DLSS. The simple truth is most buy Nvidia because they were told to.
    Reply
  • Eximo
    Also the volume. Generally more Nvidia cards in OEMs and on the shelves because there are simply more of them. If everyone switched to AMD, they wouldn't be able to keep up in the short term.

    AMD would have to wildly over produce and drop prices if they wanted to make much progress, and they still wouldn't be competing that well at the top end.

    But it makes more financial sense for them to keep even their prices high at the top end so that enthusiasts can cover the costs of the big GPUs.

    Not sure why a new release product being more expensive than the current one is a surprise to anyone. Nvidia is basically competing with themselves in the low end mobile gaming market. Can't say I see any good deals on discrete AMD mobile graphics with any regularity. Always RTX 3050/4050 laptops on sale.
    Reply
  • subspruce
    Eximo said:
    Also the volume. Generally more Nvidia cards in OEMs and on the shelves because there are simply more of them. If everyone switched to AMD, they wouldn't be able to keep up in the short term.

    AMD would have to wildly over produce and drop prices if they wanted to make much progress, and they still wouldn't be competing that well at the top end.

    But it makes more financial sense for them to keep even their prices high at the top end so that enthusiasts can cover the costs of the big GPUs.

    Not sure why a new release product being more expensive than the current one is a surprise to anyone. Nvidia is basically competing with themselves in the low end mobile gaming market. Can't say I see any good deals on discrete AMD mobile graphics with any regularity. Always RTX 3050/4050 laptops on sale.
    despite Navi 33 not being used at a 24CU configuration. Pretty sure AMD has quite a bit of those yields, but isn't using them
    Reply
  • Eximo
    They may be putting them out in the Asian market or reserving them for OEM GPUs. Or the yields are good so that the smallest they make is 28 CU.
    Reply