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There’s a common misconception that NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX GPUs are solely for gaming and some content creation workloads, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. While NVIDIA offers a range of powerful, purpose-built enterprise products for specialized engineering, data science, economics, and AI/ML applications, GeForce RTX GPUs can also accelerate many of these workloads — all GPUs are massively parallel processors, after all. In fact, NVIDIA’s consumer, professional, and business products often use similar GPU architectures. Many of the applications that Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) students use can greatly benefit from GPU acceleration, and with this in mind, NVIDIA recently launched an initiative to educate STEM students about the benefits of GPU acceleration with many of the popular STEM applications out there.

A claim on NVIDIA’s website states: “NVIDIA GeForce RTX laptops do so much more than just boost high-performance gaming applications — they also boost studies for STEM majors. Powerful Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) help students work faster, with acceleration for top student applications…”

NVIDIA’s STEM Laptops for Students Accelerate Many Important Applications

Purchasing a new laptop is often a top priority for students as they head off to college, switch colleges, or just start a new school year. And high portability is typically a must; most students want a thin and light laptop that can be easily carried from class to class. Unfortunately, many of the thinnest and lightest ultraportable laptops are relatively underpowered and rely on simple, integrated graphics solutions. That’s fine for online tooling and editing Word documents, but it can significantly hamper the performance of many popular STEM applications.

NVIDIA’s STEM campaign highlights not only the many applications that get a massive performance boost with GPU acceleration, but also a wide range of highly portable laptops equipped with the latest GeForce RTX mobile GPUs. NVIDIA basically claims that STEM students can have their cake and eat it too.

There are a myriad of GPU-accelerated STEM applications, including PyTorch, Tensorflow, Matlab, Ansys Discovery, and Unreal Engine 5, just to name a few. Many fast-growing areas such as Deep Learning, Data Analytics, and 3D modeling rely on applications that can get major performance gains from GPU acceleration. And that performance improvement often translates into significant time savings, a superior user experience, or both, meaning more class work can be done faster.

NVIDIA lists a range of GeForce RTX-equipped laptops on its website that are ideal for STEM students, from companies like Dell, ASUS, and others. If you peruse the offerings, you will find a diverse array of options that are highly portable, yet offer the powerful GPU, CPU, memory and storage configurations to run STEM applications with excellent performance.

NVIDIA STEM laptops offer huge performance gains

To put NVIDIA’s claims to the test, we actually tried out an ASUS STEM laptop at HotHardware – the sub-$900 ASUS TUF Dash F15 with a GeForce RTX 3070 – with Matlab and a handful of AI/ML workloads – to see how it performed versus a CPU with only integrated graphics, and the results were grim. For example, regarding a machine vision application, author Ben Funk says: “The GeForce RTX 3070 handled about 415 images per second, while Intel’s integrated graphics card could only handle about 15 with the same set of images. That’s a performance improvement of about 27.67x, or more than 2,700% of performance.” That’s an absolutely massive performance boost. And if you read through the entire article, you’ll also notice that the machine generally performs very well in a wide range of benchmarks, and the battery life is solid too.

Speeding up commonly used applications, improving the user experience and ultimately giving back time to STEM students are very real, noticeable benefits that can help these students achieve their educational goals faster and easier. As such, NVIDIA’s awareness efforts here are spot on. And of course, having a GeForce in a laptop can also help STEM students blow off steam at their favorite games, which is an added benefit that many of them will appreciate.