MSI Raider A18 HX: Overkill Power, Underwhelming Refresh Rate

We challenge all systems’ graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark test suite. The first two, Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K), use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. The next pair, Steel Nomad’s regular and Light subtests, focuses on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. Last, we turn to Solar Bay to measure ray tracing performance in a synthetic environment.

Our real-world gaming testing comes from the in-game benchmarks of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and F1 2024. These three games—all benchmarked at the system’s full HD (1080p or 1200p native) resolution—represent competitive shooter, open-world, and simulation games, respectively. If the screen is capable of a higher resolution, we rerun the tests at the QHD equivalent of 1440p or 1600p. Each game runs at two sets of graphics settings per resolution for up to four runs total on each game.

We run the Call of Duty benchmark at the Minimum graphics preset—aimed at maximizing frame rates to test display refresh rates—and again at the Extreme preset. Our Cyberpunk 2077 test settings aim to push PCs fully, so we run it on the Ultra graphics preset and again at the all-out Ray Tracing Overdrive preset without DLSS or FSR. Finally, F1 2024 represents our DLSS effectiveness (or FSR on AMD systems) test, demonstrating a GPU’s capacity for frame-boosting upscaling technologies. The degree of these frame-rate boosts changes with the version of frame-generation tech available, with DLSS 2 and 3 stitching in one AI-generated frame for every originally rendered frame, and the latest DLSS version (DLSS 4) inserting up to three additional frames. (FSR can generate up to four new frames per original, while XeSS can stitch in only one new frame per original.)

The Raider A18 HX took the lead in our graphics and gaming benchmarks—unsurprising, given its heap-topping Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090. The Raider even managed to beat out the Razer Blade 16 with the same GPU. These results are as fast as you’ll see in a gaming laptop today and for the near future.

The only question: Are these frame-rate advantages enough to justify the $1,300 upcharge from the RTX 5080, especially since the RTX 5080 is more than fast enough for all but the most hard-core gamers? Many users might be willing to “settle” for the slightly lower frame rates to get the very significant savings.

Also, take another consideration. If you dial back any in-game settings by much, depending on the game, you may butt up against the 120Hz refresh-rate ceiling of the Raider’s screen before you run out of frames to push. That’s, to an extent, a problem most users wish they had with their gaming laptop—but it’s not one you want to pay $5,000-plus to encounter! It double-underscores why the RTX 5080 in the AMD or Intel version of this Raider laptop may make more fiscal, and common, sense.