NVIDIA Quadro T2000 Max-Q vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 6GB Laptop GPU

The Nvidia Quadro T2000 with Max-Q Design is a professional mobile graphics card that is based on the Turing architecture (TU117 chip). It is based on the consumer desktop GTX 1650 Ti therefore currently between a mobile GTX 1650 and GTX 1660 Ti. The chip is manufactured in 12nm FinFET at TSMC. Compared to the normal Quadro T2000, the Max-Q variants are clocked lower and work in a more efficient state. Currently, we know of two variants with different clock speeds and power consumptions (35 and 40 W).

The Turing generation did not only introduce raytracing for the RTX cards, but also optimized the architecture of the cores and caches. According to Nvidia the CUDA cores offer now a concurrent execution of floating point and integer operations for increased performance in compute-heavy workloads of modern games. Furthermore, the caches were reworked (new unified memory architecture with twice the cache compared to Pascal). This leads to up to 50% more instructions per clock and a 40% more power efficient usage compared to Pascal.

The performance in professional apps should be clearly lower than a normal (Max-P) Quadro T2000 due to the lower clock speeds, but still ahead the slower Quadro T1000 due to the higher shader count. Compared to consumer cards, the mobile GTX 1650 should be still slower.

Thanks to the relative low power consumption of the Quadro T2000 Max-Q, the GPU is suited for thin and light laptops. The used TU116 chip is manufactured in 12nm FFN at TSMC.

The 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).