The Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, powered primarily by AMD hardware, have the potential to be quite powerful when they launch near the end of the year. Desktop gaming PCs will always be competition, but Nvidia believes the biggest challenger to the new consoles will be gaming laptops, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on a recent conference call with investors that the gaming laptop category is essentially itself a "new gaming machine" and the largest in terms of popularity.

Jensen's comments were in response to a question about the company's sales projections for gaming laptops this year.

"Our notebook business is ..... .8 consecutive quarters of double-digit growth, which is undeniably a new gaming category. It's like a new gaming console. I think this is going to be the biggest gaming machine in the world. The reason for that is that more people have laptops than any other device."

"Being able to put RTX on a thin and light notebook is a real breakthrough," Jensen added.

"And it's one of the reasons we've had so much success with notebooks."

The introduction of Nvidia's Max-Q design made this possible; Max-Q GPUs are not as powerful as comparable GPUs, but they enable thinner and lighter form factors. For example, one of the best gaming laptops, MSI's G65 Stealth Thin, is only 0.69 inches thick and weighs just over 4 pounds, as is Acer's Triton 500, a 0.7-inch thick, 4.41-pound laptop with a GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q GPU.

Regardless, do the numbers add up: according to IDC, gaming notebook shipments increased nearly 13% in Q2 2019 compared to the same period last year. At the time of the report, IDC had projected full-year gaming laptop shipments at 19.4 million units.

As PCGamesN points out, 106 million PS4s have been sold over the past six years. This works out to an average of about 18 million units per year. In its first year, PS4 sold 13.7 million units.

So, from my perspective, yes, the numbers do add up: gaming laptops are a big deal right now, and it's hard to predict what will happen when the Xbox Series X and PS5 arrive, or what effect Nvidia's upcoming Ampere GPU will have. It is difficult to predict, but it is clear that gaming laptops are a major force in the industry, and their ability to easily connect to a TV should help them compete with gaming consoles.

Thank you, Seeking Alpha, for your time.