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crysania4
Known Participant
November 13, 2025
Question

Graphics card recommendations

  • November 13, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 158 views

I'm looking to upgrade my Windows laptop soon and trying to decide between which graphics card to get.

 

The price difference between the two laptops I'm looking at is about $350 (identical except for the graphics card - both Ultra 9 275HX 24-core processors, 64GB of RAM and 2TB SSDs).

 

The two cards are the Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5080.

 

The major issue I have with my current laptop is how slow it is with AI Denoise. I often denoise hundreds of images from an event (need to shoot high ISO, no I cannot shoot at a lower ISO). Right now I have to do about 50 at a time and that takes a good 15 minutes (mine has the 3050). It tends to add a few days to my getting the photos out to people.

 

Is there a huge difference in speed between these two cards? Is the 5080 worth the $350 higher price tag? I will spend it if I need to (I do this semi-professionally) but I don't want to if it's really not much of a jump in speed.

2 replies

Legend
November 13, 2025

Don't confuse those with the desktop cards, laptop versions of those chips are slower. Just an FYI.

crysania4
crysania4Author
Known Participant
November 14, 2025

I'm not? I'm looking solely at laptops. So still, is there a difference between them that's big enough to justify the $350 extra? Or are you saying that NEITHER are good enough? 

Legend
November 14, 2025

If you look at the benchmark link posted above, that's desktop cards. Laptop GPUs are generally much slower. Note that this is NOT true on the Apple side, where the M-series chips are pretty much equivalent across desktop and portable machine.

 

https://www.techspot.com/review/2625-nvidia-rtx-4090-laptop-vs-desktop-gpu/

https://jarrods.tech/laptop-desktop-graphics-comparison/

https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-laptop-vs-desktop-compared-tested#

dj_paige
Legend
November 13, 2025

The two cards are the Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5080.

 

Choose either one, you will be satisfied with its speed. The benchmarks show the 5080 as about 10% faster than the 5070 Ti. However, what this translates to in terms of time to denoise your photos, I have no idea.