Acer's RTX 30-series gaming laptops are getting a free GPU speed boost

Your Acer gaming laptop is about to get a whole lot more powerful. The company is increasing the amount of power it's throwing at the RTX 30-series mobile GPUs in current (and future) gaming laptops. Machines, such as the Nitro 5, Predator Helios, and Predator Triton 300, are getting a boost from 5 to 30 watts, increasing graphical performance all via a free firmware update.  

It's not every day we see manufacturers step in and crank up the TGP of the GPUs on their laptops well after they've hit the market. Increasing the TGP (Total Graphics Power) means more juice can be funneled into the system's GPU, improving performance. At least in theory. 

We won't know until we get our hands on a laptop that has this new update to see how significant an fps bump we get during gaming. We have to expect that Acer knows what it's doing, and the cooling on offer within these gaming laptops is enough to cope with the extra heat the higher power GPUs will generate. If not the chips could hit their thermal limits and throttle back under serious load.

But, assuming this goes well for Acer, it'll be easy for other OEMs to pull a similar move on their own notebooks to eke out more performance simply by adjusting system power levels. 

Marcel Behm, Senior Business Manager Acer Germany released a statement regarding the update, "Our claim to gaming hardware is to offer a balance between the best possible CPU and GPU performance, volume, and durability. Accordingly, we are pleased to offer both interested buyers, and many of our existing customers improved graphics performance with the BIOS update."

The folks over at ComputerBase broke down how much of a TGP boost each of the Acer gaming notebooks is getting and we've pulled it all into a handy chart at the bottom of this article. 

An interesting stand-out is the Helios 300 with an RTX 3060, which is getting a whopping +30W TGP boost after the update. It will be interesting to see how this change will affect things like system stability, GPU temperature, and of course, frame rates. 

And also whether the end-user will be able to easily roll it back if they find things are suddenly a little louder than they were comfortable with.

We have reached out to Acer for comment regarding the update, and will update as and when we hear anything back.