The reason gaming laptops and desktops are often synonymous with high performance is that games are among the most demanding applications in terms of hardware performance. If it weren’t for the large number of gamers helping to share the cost of GPU production, it would be difficult for industries like scientific research and design to support the development of high-performance computing on their own.
01
FLOPS as a Measure of Performance
When we assess a computer’s performance, we often use the unit FLOPS (floating point operations per second). The amount of computation required by an application comes from two dimensions: computational complexity and data volume. While many applications are more complex than games, few have data volumes larger than games—video applications being one exception. In fact, modern video games (sometimes called “video applications”) fit into this category.
02
The Massive Data Volume of Video Games
The enormous data volume in video games comes from the millions of pixels in high-resolution displays, combined with the need to refresh the screen multiple times per second to create a smooth, continuous motion. For a basic 1080p display (1920×1080 resolution) with a 60Hz refresh rate, the data volume generated every second can be calculated as follows:
1920 × 1080 × 3 (RGB) × 8 (bit depth) × 60 (frames per second) ≈ 2.986 Gbit ≈ 373MB of data per second.
Compare this to common video formats, which run at only 24–30 frames per second. The computational demand of decoding video is also much lower than that of 3D games, which involve complex operations like transforming 3D wireframe models, applying textures, and rendering the final image. In cutting-edge games that use ray tracing, the complexity increases further as each ray of light may be traced through multiple reflections and scatterings—all of which adds considerable computation.
03
Gaming GPU Performance
For example, a GPU like the GTX 1060 (often used for 1080p gaming) has a theoretical performance of 3.5–4.3 TFLOPS (single-precision). The data volume per second for a 1080p game amounts to 93 million single-precision floating point numbers. Assuming the GPU operates at 50% efficiency, at 3.5 TFLOPS, each piece of data is processed 18,000 times per second, illustrating the intense computational workload required even for standard gaming.
For comparison, a full-power RTX 3060 (a popular gaming laptop GPU) boasts a theoretical performance of 9.85–13.08 TFLOPS, more than double that of the GTX 1060, showing how GPU power scales with more demanding modern games.
04
CPU vs. GPU Performance
On the CPU side, a high-end desktop processor like the 16-core AMD Ryzen 5950X can achieve theoretical performance of about 1.74 TFLOPS when utilizing AVX2 instructions, which operate on 8 single-precision floating-point numbers per 256-bit instruction, with Fused Multiply-Add (FMA) allowing two operations per clock cycle, and with 2 floating-point units per core. At its base clock speed of 3.4 GHz, the theoretical calculation is:
8 × 2 × 2 × 16 (cores) × 3.4 GHz ≈ 1.74 TFLOPS.
While this is respectable for a CPU, it’s still far lower than the GPU’s performance in tasks like gaming, which explains why dedicated GPUs are crucial for heavy computational tasks in games.
05
Conclusion: Why Gaming Laptops Are Powerhouses
Laptops equipped with discrete GPUs are often called gaming laptops because they are designed to handle the extremely high-performance demands of modern video games. The ability to run games, which involve complex calculations and massive data processing, demonstrates the incredible power of these machines. If a laptop can run a game at high settings and smooth frame rates, its performance is generally more than sufficient for most other computational tasks. Therefore, meeting the extreme demands of games is a clear indicator of high overall performance.
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