Nvidia RTX 1000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 vs NVIDIA RTX 3000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU

Nvidia RTX 1000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU

The 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

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 is a mid-range desktop graphics card. It is based on the GA106 Ampere chip and offers 8 GB GDDR6 graphics memory with a 128 Bit memory bus. It offers 2,560 cores and supports PCIe 4.0.

The performance is similar to the older GeForce RTX 2060 and therefore best suited for 1080p gaming of modern and demanding games in high settings.

The GA106 chip offers 3,840 FP32 ALUs of which half can also execute INT32 instructions (i.e. 1,920 INT32 ALUs). 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 GA106 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). The TDP of the RTX 3050 is specified at 130 Watt and therefore better than the previous RTX 2060 (160 Watt).

NVIDIA RTX 3000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU

The Nvidia RTX 3000 Ada Generation, not to be confused with the A3000, P3000 or RTX 3000 Turing Generation, is a higher-end professional graphics card for use in laptops that sports 4,608 CUDA cores and 8 GB of ECC GDDR6 VRAM (error correction can be turned off if desired). It would be fair to say that this is a GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop in disguise; consequently, the graphics card is fast enough for many games at 1440p with quality set to High. Brought into existence in 2023, the RTX 3000 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 use rather than gaming. 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 smarter technique is used 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 tasks.

The RTX 3000 Ada features 36 RT cores of the 3rd generation, 144 Tensor cores of the 4th generation and 4,608 CUDA cores, making it ~11% inferior to the RTX 3500 Ada Generation as long as we disregard clock speed differences. (The 3500 also has more VRAM). The RTX 3000 comes with 8 GB of 128-bit wide ECC GDDR6 memory for throughput of ~256 GB/s. The fact that error correction is present here proves that the graphics adapter is indeed targeted at professional users, and it can be disabled if desired.

Just like Ampere-based cards, the RTX 3000 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

Having reviewed the Dell Precision 5480 and its 50 W RTX 3000 Ada in September 2023, we can firmly say the graphics card is in the same league as the RTX 4060 Laptop and the RTX 4050 Laptop, despite sharing most of its specifications with the RTX 4070 Laptop. 48 seconds in the Blender 3.3 Classroom CUDA test and a 3DMark 11 Performance GPU score of less than 30,000 points are nothing to write home about. The GPU's gaming talents are not mind-blowing, either, although it is certainly capable enough for 1080p gaming.

• Tiny Tina's Wonderlands - almost 90 fps at 1080p / High
• Cyberpunk 2077 - over 60 fps at 1080p / High

Nvidia's marketing materials mention "up to 20 TFLOPS" of performance, a very noticeable improvement over 14.5 TFLOPS delivered by the RTX 2000 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 graphics card is. A 100 W RTX 3000 Ada might be able to come close to the average RTX 4070 Laptop.

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 especially the case for the RTX 3000, 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). This is the kind of delta that we've be seeing on consumer-grade laptops featuring the latest GeForce RTX cards.

Last but not the least, the improved 5 nm process (TSMC 4N) the RTX 3000 Ada is built with makes for very decent energy efficiency, as of mid 2023.