Nvidia RTX 1000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 6GB Laptop GPU vs NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU
Nvidia RTX 1000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU
► remove from comparisonThe Nvidia RTX 1000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU, not to be confused with the A1000, P1000 or T1000, is a lower-end professional graphics card for use in laptops that sports 2,560 CUDA cores and 6 GB of GDDR6 VRAM. It would be fair to say that this is a GeForce RTX 4050 (Laptop) in disguise; consequently, both are powered by the AD107 chip and are fast enough to handle most games at 1080p with quality set to High. The product was launched in February 2024; it leverages TSMC's 5 nm process and the Ada Lovelace architecture. 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; under-the-hood refinements are plentiful, including an immensely larger L2 cache, an optimized ray tracing routine (a different way to determine what is transparent and what isn't is used), 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 proprietary Nvidia technologies, including Optimus and DLSS 3, and they can certainly be used for various AI applications.
The RTX 1000 Ada features 20 RT cores of the 3rd generation, 80 Tensor cores of the 4th generation and 2,560 CUDA cores. Increase those numbers by 20%, and you get the RTX 2000 Ada - as long as we pay no attention to clock speed differences, of course. Unlike costlier Ada Generation professional laptop graphics cards, the RTX 1000 comes with just 6 GB of non-ECC VRAM; the lack of error correction makes this card less suitable for super-important tasks and round-the-clock operation. The VRAM is just 96-bit wide, delivering a not-so-impressive bandwidth of ~192 GB/s.
The RTX 1000 Ada Generation makes use of the PCI-Express 4 protocol, just like Ampere-based cards did. 8K SUHD monitors are supported, however, DP 1.4a video outputs may prove to be a bottleneck down the line.
Performance
While we are yet to test a single laptop powered by an RTX 1000 Ada as of late February, we have plenty of performance data for the RTX 4050 Laptop. Based on that, we expect a run-of-the-mill RTX 2000 Ada to deliver:
- a Blender 3.3 Classroom CUDA score of around 54 seconds
- a 3DMark 11 GPU score of around 27,000 points
- around 50 fps in GTA V (1440p - Highest settings possible, 16x AF, 4x MSAA, FXAA)
- upwards of 30 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p - High settings, Ultra RT, "Quality" DLSS)
Nvidia's marketing materials mention "up to 12.1 TFLOPS" of performance, a downgrade compared to 14.5 TFLOPS delivered by the RTX 2000 Ada.
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 1000 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 exactly the case with the RTX 1000, as the lowest value recommended for it sits at just 35 W while the highest is 300% higher at 140 W (this most likely includes Dynamic Boost). The slowest system built around an RTX 1000 Ada can easily be half as fast as the fastest one.
Last but not the least, the improved 5 nm process (TSMC 4N) the RTX 1000 is built with makes for decent energy efficiency, as of early 2024.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 6GB Laptop GPU
► remove from comparisonThe Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 6GB Laptop GPU (mobile, GN20-P0-R, 2023 Refresh) is the refresh of the RTX 3050 4GB Laptop GPU (slowest RTX 3000 mobile card) and also based on the GA107 Ampere chip. The 6GB variant offers more CUDA cores (2,560, +25%) but a cut down memory bus to 96 Bit. The clock speed depends on the TGP variant and can range from 713 - 1530 (base) and 1058 - 1740 (boost) for the TGP variants of 35 to 80 Watt (see table below).
The performance is between the old 4GB RTX 3050 and the RTX 3050 Ti and therefore best suited for full HD gaming (1920 x 1080) in medium to high graphic settings. The performance is not sufficient to enable Raytracing in most games, but the Tensor cores can be used for DLSS in some games (and get performance boost with slight quality reduction). Beware, that the low TGP variants will offer a significantly lower performance.
The GA107 chip offers 3,072 FP32 ALUs of which half can also execute INT32 instructions (i.e. 1,536 INT32 ALUs). The RTX 3050 however maybe won't use all ALUs on the chip. With Turing all shaders could still execute FP32 or INT32 instructions. The raytracing and tensor cores on the chip were also improved according to Nvidia. The Ampere chips also include an improved 5th generation video encoder (NVENC for H.264 and H.265) and a 7th generation decoder (for various formats now including AV1).
The GA107 chip is manufactured by Samsung in 8nm (8N), which is not quite able to keep up with the 7nm node at TSMC (e.g. used by AMD and also for the professional GA100 Ampere chip).
NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU
► remove from comparisonThe Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada Generation, not to be confused with the A4000, P4000 or RTX 4000 Turing Generation, is a very powerful professional graphics card for use in laptops that sports 7,424 CUDA cores and 12 GB of ECC GDDR6 VRAM. Brought into existence in 2023, this graphics adapter leverages TSMC's 5 nm process and Nvidia's Ada Lovelace architecture to achieve great performance combined with moderate power consumption. The Nvidia-recommended TGP range for the card is very wide at 60 W to 175 W leading to bizarre performance differences between different systems powered by what is supposed to be the same product.
Hardware-wise, the RTX 4000 is a GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop in disguise. Consequently, both make use of the AD103 chip and have little difficulty running triple-A games at QHD 1440p.
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 - 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 and an optimized ray tracing routine (a different way to determine what is transparent and what isn't is used) 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 tasks.
The RTX 4000 features 58 RT cores of the 3rd generation, 232 Tensor cores of the 4th generation and 7,424 CUDA cores, making it a lot faster than the RTX 3500 Ada Generation. Elsewhere, the graphics card comes with 12 GB of 192-bit wide ECC GDDR6 memory for a very healthy throughput of ~432 GB/s. Error correction can be turned off if desired. The fact that error correction is present here proves that the RTX 4000 is indeed targeted at professional users.
Just like Ampere-based cards, the RTX 4000 makes use of the PCI-Express 4 protocol. 8K SUHD monitors are supported, however DP 1.4a video outputs can potentially prove to be a bottleneck down the line.
Performance
While we have not tested a single system featuring an RTX 4000 Ada Generation as of February 2024, we have plenty of performance data for the GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop, a graphics card with very similar specifications. Based on that, we fully expect the RTX 4000 to deliver:
- a Blender 3.3 Classroom CUDA score of around 23 seconds
- a 3DMark 11 GPU score of around 57,000
- at least 115 fps in GTA V (1440p - Highest settings possible, 16x AF, 4x MSAA, FXAA)
- close to 50 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p - High settings, Ultra RT, "Quality" DLSS)
Nvidia's marketing materials mention "up to 33.5 TFLOPS" of performance which is impressive. The RTX 5000 Ada Generation delivers a little over 42 TFLOPS, for reference.
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 4000 is. One other thing worth mentioning is that enabling error correction appears to reduce the amount of video memory that is available to applications and games by up to a gigabyte.
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 the case with the RTX 4000, as the lowest value recommended for it sits at just 60 W while the highest is more than two times higher at 175 W (this most likely includes Dynamic Boost). The slowest system built around an RTX 4000 Ada can easily be 60% slower than 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 4000 Ada is built with makes for very decent energy efficiency, as of mid 2023.
Nvidia RTX 1000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 6GB Laptop GPU | NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
RTX Ada Generation Laptop GPU Series |
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Codename | GN21-X2 | GN20-P0-R 6GB | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Architecture | Ada Lovelace | Ampere | Ada Lovelace | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Pipelines | 2560 - unified | 2560 - unified | 7424 - unified | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
TMUs | 80 | 80 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
ROPs | 32 | 32 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Raytracing Cores | 20 | 16 | 58 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tensor / AI Cores | 80 | 64 | 232 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Cache | L2: 12 MB | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Memory Speed | 16000 effective = 2000 MHz | 12000 effective = 1500 MHz | 16000 effective = 2000 MHz | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Memory Bus Width | 96 Bit | 96 Bit | 192 Bit | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Memory Type | GDDR6 | GDDR6 | GDDR6 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Max. Amount of Memory | 6 GB | 6 GB | 12 GB | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Shared Memory | no | no | no | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Memory Bandwidth | 192 GB/s | 144 GB/s | 432 GB/s | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
API | DirectX 12 Ultimate, Shader 6.7, OpenGL 4.6, OpenCL 3.0, Vulkan 1.3 | DirectX 12_2, Shader 6.7, OpenGL 4.6 | DirectX 12 Ultimate, Shader 6.7, OpenGL 4.6, OpenCL 3.0, Vulkan 1.3 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Power Consumption | 115 Watt (35 - 115 Watt TGP) | 60 Watt (35 - 80 Watt TGP) | 150 Watt (60 - 150 Watt TGP) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
technology | 5 nm | 8 nm | 5 nm | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
PCIe | 4.0 x16 | 4.0 | 4.0 x16 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Displays | 4 Displays (max.), HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4a | HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4a | 4 Displays (max.), HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4a | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Notebook Size | large | large | large | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Date of Announcement | 27.02.2024 | 06.01.2023 | 21.03.2023 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Link to Manufacturer Page | images.nvidia.com | images.nvidia.com | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Core Speed | 1237 - 1492 (Boost) MHz | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Features | NVIDIA DLSS, NVIDIA Reflex, Resizable BAR, NVIDIA Broadcast, NVIDIA Ansel, NVIDIA ShadowPlay, NVIDIA G-SYNC, Advanced Optimus, Nvidia Max-Q, Dynamic Boost | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Predecessor | GeForce RTX 3050 4GB Laptop GPU | RTX A3000 Laptop GPU | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Theoretical Performance | 33.6 TFLOPS FP32 |