NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 vs NVIDIA RTX 2000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 is a mid-range desktop GPU manufactured using the 5 nm process at TSMC. The AD107 chip is used here. It combines 3,072 shader units and 8 GB of GDDR6 memory. The memory interface is 128-bit, resulting in a memory bandwidth of 272 GB/s in conjunction with the VRAM clock speed.

Features

The features that were introduced with the high-end models of the Ada Lovelace generation, such as DLSS 3.0 with frame generation, are also present in the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060. This sets the new mid-range card apart from the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 and provides a significant advantage in games that offer these features.

Performance

Without DLSS, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 performs slightly behind the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. Compared to AMD, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 often competes with an AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT. The GeForce RTX 4060 caters to the 1080p gaming range in terms of performance. At times, the performance is sufficient for 1440p gaming as well, although older games are more suitable for this resolution. Additionally, some compromises in terms of graphical fidelity might be necessary for the latest games. The performance is suitable for playable frame rates at high detail settings.

Power Consumption

The power consumption of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 is specified by the manufacturer at 115 Watts (TDP). This is significantly lower than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, which has a TDP of 170 watts. In comparison to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti (200 W TDP), the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 performs well and delivers similar performance with significantly lower power consumption. Power is supplied through a PCIe slot and an additional 6+2-pin connector.

NVIDIA RTX 2000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU

The Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU, not to be confused with the A2000, P2000 or T2000, is a mid-range professional graphics card for use in laptops that sports 3,072 CUDA cores and 8 GB of GDDR6 VRAM. It would be fair to say that this is a GeForce RTX 4060 (Laptop) in disguise; consequently, the former is powered by the same AD107 chip as the latter, and is fast enough to handle any triple-A game at 1080p with Ultra quality settings. Brought into existence in 2023, the RTX 2000 leverages TSMC's 5 nm process and Nvidia's Ada Lovelace architecture to achieve very decent performance combined with moderate power consumption. The Nvidia-recommended TGP range for the card is very wide at 35 W to 140 W leading to bizarre performance differences between different systems powered by what is supposed to be the same product.

Quadro series graphics cards ship with much different BIOS and drivers than GeForce cards and are targeted at professional users rather than gamers. Commercial product design, large-scale calculations, simulation, data mining, 24 x 7 operation, certified drivers - if any of this sounds familiar, then a Quadro card will make you happy.

Architecture and Features

Ada Lovelace brings a range of improvements over older graphics cards utilizing the outgoing Ampere architecture. It's not just a better manufacturing process and a higher number of CUDA cores that we have here (up to 16,384 versus 10,752); under-the-hood refinements are plentiful, including an immensely larger L2 cache, an optimized ray tracing routine (a different way is employed to determine what is transparent and what isn't), and other changes. Naturally, these graphics cards can both encode and decode some of the most widely used video codecs, AVC, HEVC and AV1 included; they also support a host of Nvidia technologies, including Optimus and DLSS 3, and they can certainly be used for various AI applications.

The RTX 2000 features 24 RT cores of the 3rd generation, 96 Tensor cores of the 4th generation and 3,072 CUDA cores. Increase those numbers by 50%, and you get an RTX 3000 Ada Generation - as long as we disregard clock speed differences, of course. Unlike costlier Ada Generation professional laptop graphics cards, the RTX 2000 comes with 8 GB of non-ECC VRAM; the lack of error correction makes this card less suitable for super-important tasks and round-the-clock operation. Much like it is with the RTX 3000 Ada Generation, the VRAM is 128-bit wide and delivers a decent bandwidth of ~256 GB/s.

The RTX 2000 Ada Generation makes use of the PCI-Express 4 protocol, just like Ampere-based cards. 8K SUHD monitors are supported, however, DP 1.4a video outputs can potentially prove to be a bottleneck down the line.

Performance

The average RTX 2000 Ada in our extensive database is much closer to the RTX 4050 Laptop than it is to the RTX 4060 Laptop.

Nvidia's marketing materials mention "up to 14.5 TFLOPS" of performance, a significant downgrade compared to 20 TFLOPS delivered by the RTX 3000 Ada Generation.

Your mileage may vary depending on how competent the cooling solution of your laptop is and how high the TGP power target of the RTX 2000 Ada is.

Power consumption

Nvidia no longer divides its laptop graphics cards into Max-Q and non-max-Q models. Instead, laptop makers are free to set the TGP according to their needs, and the range can sometimes be shockingly wide. This is especially the case for the RTX 2000, as the lowest value recommended for it sits at just 35 W while the highest is 300% higher at 140 W. The slowest system built around an RTX 2000 Ada can easily be half as fast as the fastest one. This is the kind of delta that we've already seen on consumer-grade laptops featuring the latest GeForce RTX cards.

Last but not the least, the improved 5 nm process (TSMC 4N) the RTX 2000 is built with makes for very decent energy efficiency, as of mid 2023.