Historically, Chromebooks have been lightweight, affordable laptops targeting younger (or simply less tech-savvy) users. It all sounds very promising, although I have to question exactly who these are aimed at, just as I did back when the original ‘gaming Chromebooks’ arrived.
The first is upgraded power range support (up to 240W) on at least one USB-C port, and the second is a clever way for the Chromebook to run directly off mains power when plugged in, ‘bypassing’ the battery entirely to improve thermal performance and preserve your battery’s health. On top of this, there are two new power-related features designed with gaming in mind. This means you’ll be able to upgrade your RAM simply by opening up the chassis – a useful feature for a gaming laptop as RAM requirements for games keep climbing. They’ll be equipped with newer, faster DDR5 RAM – which, notably, appears to be unsoldered, a rarity among Chromebooks. Several new features have been spotted via the Chromium database, all of which should help turn ‘Cora’ and ‘Zeus’ into more competent gaming machines. Putting RTX cards in Chromebooks is a big step forward for Nvidia, and it looks like Google is taking the partnership very seriously too. With Intel’s Arc GPUs rapidly improving and AMD stepping into the handheld gaming space, it’s good to see Nvidia taking steps to make gaming more accessible via its own GPUs. It’s been a bit of a tough year for Nvidia so far, and criticism has been rampant about the high price of Team Green’s more powerful cards. Even for more premium Chromebooks, Nvidia’s latest generation of GPUs can make use of the nifty DLSS 3 upscaling tech for better performance at QHD and above.
The RTX 4050 likely won’t be one of the best graphics cards around, but it should be perfectly capable of running all the best PC games natively – at 1080p at least, which is fine since most Chromebooks don’t have high-resolution displays. Although I’ve championed the potential of gaming on integrated graphics in the past, and there’s no denying the impressive power of AMD’s new Z1 APU (as seen recently in the Asus ROG Ally gaming handheld), the fact is that integrated GPUs just aren’t up to scratch compared to the discrete graphics cards found in the best gaming laptops. Without a dedicated GPU, though, gaming performance has been limited at best. Gaming on Chromebooks has been a long-term goal for Google, with the search engine giant implementing Play Store support and working with Valve to get the popular PC gaming platform Steam up and running on Chrome OS.
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