The Nvidia RTX 500 Ada Generation, not to be confused with the A500, P500 and the T500, is a lower-end professional graphics card for use in laptops that sports 2,048 CUDA cores and a paltry 4 GB of GDDR6 VRAM. We believe this graphics card to be a heavily cut-down GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop; therefore, both should employ the Ada Lovelace AD107 chip built with TSMC's 5 nm process. The RTX 500 was launched in February 2024. The Nvidia-recommended TGP range for this graphics card is moderately wide at 35 W to 60 W leading to noticeable performance differences between different systems powered by what is supposed to be the same graphics card.
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 500 Ada features 16 RT cores of the 3rd generation, 64 Tensor cores of the 4th generation and 2,048 CUDA cores. Increase those numbers by 25%, and you get the RTX 1000 Ada - as long as we pay no attention to clock speed differences, of course. Unlike costlier Ada Generation professional laptop graphics cards, the RTX 500 comes with just 4 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 64-bit wide, delivering an anemic bandwidth of ~128 GB/s.
The RTX 500 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 the RTX 500 Ada as of late February, it's realistic to expect it to be just a little slower than the average RTX 3050 Laptop. Yes, that's right; the RTX 500 has no chance of matching the RTX 4050 Laptop in sheer performance due to the reduced core count and smaller memory bus. Nvidia's marketing materials mention "up to 9.2 TFLOPS" of performance, a significant downgrade compared to 12.1 TFLOPS delivered by the RTX 1000 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 500 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. The RTX 500 Ada got luckier than many, as the lowest value recommended for it sits at 35 W while the highest value is 60 W (this most likely includes Dynamic Boost). Real-world performance of the slowest RTX 500 Ada will probably be around 40% lower than that of the fastest one.
Last but not the least, the improved 5 nm process (TSMC 4N) the RTX 500 Ada is built with makes for decent energy efficiency, as of early 2024.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 with Max-Q design is the power saving variant of the mobile GeForce RTX 2060. Therefore it is a high end gaming graphics card for thin laptops. It is based on the same chip as the RTX 2060 but with reduced clock speeds and a lower power consumption. It was released in 2020 with the Zephyrus G14 gaming laptop.
With the refresh, Nvidia also reworked the Max-Q technologies for more efficiency. Low Voltage GDDR6 (lower clocked but more headroom for the GPU) and improved regulator efficiency should improve the performance per Watt. Two new optional features can also be implemented by the OEM. Max-Q Dynamic Boost is able to shift power from the CPU to the GPU on a per frame basis to increase overall performance. Furthermore, the laptop manufacturer can also implement Advanced Optimus with a dynamic display switch (hardware) to enable Optimus, G-SYNC and high refresh rate displays (up to 4K 120 Hz).
The clock is not the only difference compared to the regular GTX 2060 though. The drivers for the Max-Q version were optimized for efficiency (and not performance; only for Max-Q models), there are optimized voltage converters for 1V operation, high-end cooling methods, and a 40 dB limit for the fan noise (with clock adjustments to ensure this at all times).
The performance should be only slightly below the normal RTX 2060 due to the decreased clock rates. It should be most suited for 1080p gaming at maximum detail level. Raytracing features however may reduce framerates a lot, so using raytracing will be limited to some games.
The chip is specified at a TGP of around 65 Watt and therefore clearly lower than the 80 - 90 Watt of the regular RTX 2060 Mobile.
Average Benchmarks NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q → 0%n=
- Range of benchmark values for this graphics card - Average benchmark values for this graphics card * Smaller numbers mean a higher performance 1 This benchmark is not used for the average calculation
Game Benchmarks
The following benchmarks stem from our benchmarks of review laptops. The performance depends on the used graphics memory, clock rate, processor, system settings, drivers, and operating systems. So the results don't have to be representative for all laptops with this GPU. For detailed information on the benchmark results, click on the fps number.
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- Average benchmark values for this graphics card
