Do not buy a laptop right now unless it has this

The computer is a Razer, the mountain photo in the background is via Pixabay.

In the market for a new laptop? Don’t click that buy button just yet! There’s a pretty impressive new piece of tech out there that you definitely want to at least consider before you pull the trigger on any new laptop right now.

OK, what are you talking about?

I’m talking about Nvidia’s new GTX 10-series mobile GPUs, also called “Pascal” cards. For once, this isn’t an incremental step: these cards have about double the processing power of their predecessors. But at the same time, they’re more power-efficient, so using them won’t chew through your battery quite as fast as it used to. And despite their power, they’re surprisingly small. The GTX 1060 mobile card has already found its way into some pretty slim 13″ and 14″ laptops.

As with any powerful GPU, the only real downside is price. At least right now, you’re not likely to find any machines with these cards for under US$1,000. But they’re not too bad; the cheapest laptops with GTX 1060 cards can be had for just over US$1,000.

Nvidia competitor AMD has a similar line of chips coming out under the “Polaris” name that offer a comparable jump in performance, too.

If you’re a gamer, you’d be nuts to consider buying any gaming laptop right now that doesn’t include this tech unless you’re bargain hunting. But this isn’t just relevant to gamers…

I’m not a gamer. Why should I care?

The biggest reason: virtual reality. All of the new 10-series cards are VR ready, meaning that you’ll be able to use your laptop to experience VR via headsets like the Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive. And while VR has gaming applications, there’s more to it than that. Designers of all sorts are already using VR for business applications like (for example) virtually touring a building design before the building is constructed.

This may seem irrelevant to you now, but if you’re buying a new laptop anyway, you might as well buy something future-proof. Even if there aren’t VR great applications in your industry now, you might well see a few pop up over the next few years as the technology matures.

Additionally, there are plenty of other reasons to have a computer with a good GPU, especially if you do any work related to video, art, or 3D design, as many professional programs use the GPU to speed up rendering. GPUs are also used by some software for computing tasks, and GPU processing has been used in tasks like machine learning and statistical analysis.

In short: there are good reasons to consider a laptop with a quality GPU even if you’re not a gamer.

That said, if you only use your computer for web browsing, coding, and other graphics-light tasks, then you probably don’t need this sort of GPU, and you can feel free to buy a computer that doesn’t have one of these cards.

So what’s out there right now?

Nvidia just announced these cards a couple of weeks ago, so there will be more options at every price point as time goes on. And AMD’s Polaris line is even newer; some companies (including Dell’s Alienware) have announced laptops with the cards but I don’t think any are actually available for sale yet.

Here are a few of the most promising-looking Pascal laptops you can buy now or very soon, though:

The New Razer Blade

Yeah, uh, can I get this in an Apple?

Will I have other options?