The back half of 2023 has delivered again. The triple-A belters are stacking up, with Alan Wake 2 and COD: Modern Warfare 3 showcasing what modern GPUs are really capable of. Meanwhile, big hitters like Baldur’s Gate 3, Diablo VI and Starfield offer roughly seven bazillion hours of content, and you’ve been juggling life and games all year. But here’s the thing: holiday season’s coming up.
You know this, and MSI knows this. That’s why the manufacturer’s gone all in on its Black Friday November laptop deals this year. Because it’s game time. And gaming laptops hit that sweet spot between price, performance and portability. Rather than shelling out for a monitor, a tower unit and a desk full of peripherals, it’s an all-in-one sleek, foldaway chassis. And they just got cheaper.
The difference between gaming laptops and productivity machines is the graphical grunt under the hood, and MSI’s Raider, Cyborg and Katana series gaming laptops use NVIDIA’s latest GeForce RTX 40 Series Laptop GPUs to make those graphics sing when they hit your screen.
While desktop and laptop graphics card models do differ—not least because of the different cooling demands in each environment—they share a lot of the essential tech that makes games look their best.
The big hitters here are ray tracing, DLSS and NVIDIA Reflex. If you’ve gazed in wonder at your reflection in a puddle in Battlefield V or watched neon lights bouncing off car bonnets in Cyberpunk 2077, you know how transformative ray tracing can be. Scenes are bathed in realistic lighting and reflections, immersing you deeper into your digital escape destination.
It takes considerable graphical resources to run all the complex mathematics that ray tracing requires though, and that’s where NVIDIA RTX hardware doubles up with lightning-quick on-die computational performance and DLSS.
This is where your GPU leans on deep learning to generate a higher output resolution than you’re rendering natively. DLSS is a real performance booster, allowing you to run games at lower resolution and take up less computational bandwidth, then using the Tensor cores in its architecture to interpolate higher-res images of each frame.
The latest version of DLSS 3.5 even allows Frame Generation and Ray Reconstruction, so you’re guaranteed to get a silky smooth performance even with busy scenes full of gorgeous assets and lighting conditions.
NVIDIA Reflex, meanwhile, works together with your display and input devices to create the ultimate low-latency environment for competitive gaming.
The MSI Raider GE78 HX. (Image credit: MSI)
MSI’s Raider, Katana and Cyborg gaming laptops all make use of these features via the GeForce RTX 40 series Laptop GPUs under the hood, and they’re discounted by up to 40% through November.
The Raider GE78 HX comes with a GeForce RTX 4090 laptop GPU, paired with an Intel i9-13980HX – a real heavyweight spec combo that puts this model among the most powerful gaming laptops around. The MSRP’s £3,799, but it’s now on sale from £3,199.
At a more affordable price point, the Katana 15 features a GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU and i9-13900H. It usually retails for £1,499 and is now on sale from £1,299 at Currys.
The MSI Cyborg 15. (Image credit: MSI)
Meanwhile, if you’re after an absolute steal, the Cyborg 15 is MSI’s entry-level gaming laptop and comes with a GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop GPU and i5-12450H. That’s plenty of chops for new games, and it’s discounted from the usual MSRP of £1,249 down to £699 at Currys from 22nd-28th Nov only.
To sweeten the deal, NVIDIA and MSI are running an Alan Wake 2 bundle until 27th November 2023. Buy select GeForce RTX 40 Series laptops with RTX 4090/4080/4070 Laptop GPUs, and redeem the game code worth £49.99. Get yours now.
MSI’s Black Friday deals are running throughout November, with up to 40% off. Get a great deal over on MSI’s store page.
