Sapphire was not always good but I have had nothing against them for many years now. They have redeemed themselves. The OP is mainly after a gaming laptop but let us all discuss desktops if they change their mind.

oh okay

they should try out nvidia remote or what it is called if they have access to good net
then no need for fancy gpu in the laptop

Well, hmm, about that. Speaking of the X800, I bought one of those too, and as a result ended up being part of a class action lawsuit brought against ATI (as it was then) and nVidia for price fixing. It was an opt-out thing, so I didn't bother opting out, and to my surprise eventually got a check for $50 more than I paid for the card.

Over the years I've gotten the impression that NVidia has a massively bigger marketing budget. Of course it doesn't hurt them that their PC parts have been good performers too.

The market, in case of consoles, behaves completely differently, since users aren't picking the GPU that goes in their xbox or whatever. I think they largely are GPU agnostic. Of course due to partnerships/sponsorship/advertising agreements, people see GPU makers logos in their games' splash screens.. and then end up thinking there's going to be a huge difference in perf across different companies.

In practice, there's always been vendor specific extensions, and they've pretty much always been optional. So you might get some perf or visual boost from a gimmick feature in your GPU, if the gamedevs (or the GPU company) bothered to go out of their way to use it.. but it's not *that* common.

I personally won't touch anything from nvidia since they are so hostile towards the free/open source community.

After buying and using both AMD and NVidia for years, I will not use another amd GPU product for a very long time. It's not a matter of "if" but when AMD will screw something up with their drivers.

I have only had AMD-cards in my rig (HD 7850, RX 470, Vega 56), and I've been very pleased with them. I never had any issues with drivers, both for Windows and Linux.

I'm not sure who the best manufacturer is, but Sapphire has always been excellent for me. I believe Powercolor makes the best Vega cards.

Of course there are things like these:

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Stunt_GP#Issues_fixed

^^ Wow! That leaves a really bad taste in mouth. ^^

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/dell-g5-15-se-5505-amd-smartshift

Unfortunately, even this model has issues, such as excessive heating up. Though at those levels, I guess a good cooling pad would do wonders.

By the way, my current laptop is the HP Pavilion, from the review.

Edit: I also, just found this review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSCRgvxjDwU