Day or night, laptop versions of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3000 series graphics cards will appear. However, according to a new leak, they may appear sooner than we think.

Leaker Harukaze5719 tweeted an unverified image detailing the specs of what appears to be an upcoming gaming laptop with Nvidia's mobile versions of the GeForce RTX 3080, RTX 3070, and RTX 3060.

The new laptop graphics card means that a series of new gaming laptops will be announced in 2021. We rather expect an upgraded Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 or Razer Blade 15.

The cards detailed in the leaks appear to be mostly "Max-Q" variants of the desktop RTX 3000 series GPUs; Max-Q slightly reduces the performance and power consumption of the graphics card, which can empty a laptop's battery in an instant, prevent slim gaming laptops from getting too hot.

However, the leak also mentioned a "Max-P" version of the RTX 3060; Max-Q is Nvidia's official term, while Max-P is not. However, it is generally considered to stand for "maximum performance," indicating that the laptop graphics card used is a full-power version with no power reduction.

Since the overall power consumption of the RTX 3060 will be much less than the laptop versions of the RTX 3080 and RTX 3070, the RTX 3060 is likely to be the Max-P version. Therefore, a full-power RTX 3060 could be mounted on a laptop without making the machine particularly bulky. This has been seen before with the current generation of laptops with GPUs such as the GeForce GTX 1060.

However, we would not be surprised to see full Max-P versions of the RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 on laptops with chunky chassis designed to handle the power consumption and heat generation of these powerful graphics cards. Such a laptop would be designed to be a desktop replacement, not an easily transportable gaming machine.

We need to be skeptical enough of these leaks, but WCCFtech has indicated that these could be specifications for a laptop to be unveiled at the 2021 CES. And we quite expect laptop variants of the GeForce RTX 3000 series to appear next year, as has been the case with previous generations of Nvidia GPUs.

In the past, laptop graphics were considered inferior versions of desktop graphics, but Nvidia has made progress since the Pascal generation of graphics cards. And now we can get laptop GPUs that are much closer to desktop GPUs. Therefore, the RTX 3000 series in the new generation of gaming laptops is a rather attractive prospect.

And even if the PS5 and Xbox Series X are released in a few weeks, the really exciting gaming machines could be laptops with the new RTX 3000 series graphics cards. It's quite tempting to have this much power in a portable machine.