NVIDIA Quadro M5500 vs Nvidia RTX 500 Ada Generation Laptop GPU

NVIDIA Quadro M5500

The Nvidia Quadro M5500 is a high-end, DirectX 12 (FL_12_1) and OpenGL 4.5-compatible graphics card for mobile workstations. It is a Maxwell-based GPU built on the GM204 chip with all 2048 shader cores activated and is manufactured in 28 nm at TSMC. Therefore, the GPU is similar to the consumer Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 (Notebook). Compared to the slower and less power hungry Quadro M5000M, the M5500 offers 512 more shaders which should result in 30-40% more performance according to Nvidia.

The Quadro series offers certified drivers that are optimized for stability and performance in professional applications like CAD or DCC. OpenGL performance, for example, should be significantly better compared to GeForce graphics cards of similar specifications.

Using CUDA (Compute Capability 5.2) or OpenCL 1.2, the cores of the Quadro M5000M can be used for general calculations.

The power consumption of the Quadro M5000M is rated at the same TGP of 150 Watt. Therefore, the card is suited for very large notebooks with 17-inch displays or greater.

The first laptop with the M5500 in it is the MSI WT72 Workstation.

Nvidia RTX 500 Ada Generation Laptop GPU

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.