The Nvidia RTX 3500 Ada Generation is a higher-end professional graphics card for use in laptops that sports 5,120 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 higher-than-average performance combined with moderate power consumption. The Nvidia-recommended TGP range for the card is very wide at 60 W to 140 W leading to bizarre performance differences between different systems powered by what is supposed to be the same product.
Hardware-wise, the RTX 3500 is a cut-down GeForce RTX 4070 Desktop, as far as we can tell. Consequently, both make use of the AD104 chip and have little difficulty running triple-A games at QHD 1440p.
Quadro series graphics cards ship with a different BIOS and drivers than GeForce cards and are targeted at professional users 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 different wat 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 3500 Ada features 40 RT cores of the 3rd generation, 160 Tensor cores of the 4th generation and 5,120 CUDA cores. Multiply those numbers by 1.15 and what you get looks exactly like a desktop RTX 4070: 46, 184 and 5,888, respectively. 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 3500 Ada is indeed targeted at professional users.
Just like Ampere-based cards, the RTX 3500 makes use of the PCI-Express 4 protocol. 8K SUHD monitors are supported, however, DP 1.4a video outputs may prove to be a bottleneck down the line.
Performance
With its power target set to ~105 W, the RTX graphics card delivers a Blender 3.3 Classroom CUDA score of 33 seconds which is a pretty good result. Most 2024 games are playable at 2160p on High with this GPU.
Nvidia's marketing materials mention "up to 23 TFLOPS" of performance, a 15% improvement over the 20 TFLOPS that the RTX 3000 Ada Generation is supposedly good for.
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 3500 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 for the RTX 3500, as the lowest value recommended for it sits at just 60 W while the highest is more than two times higher at 140 W (this most likely includes Dynamic Boost). The slowest system built around an RTX 3500 Ada can easily be 60% slower than the fastest one. This is the kind of delta that we've been 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 3500 is built with makes for very decent energy efficiency, as of mid 2023.
The 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
With its power target set to ~130 W, the Ada Generation graphics card delivers a Blender Classroom v3.3 CUDA score of 22 seconds which is a very good result. All 2024 games are playable at 1440p with the highest settings possible on this GPU.
Nvidia's marketing materials mention "up to 33.5 TFLOPS" of performance which is pretty impressive. The RTX 5000 Ada Generation is good for 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.
The Nvidia RTX 5000 Ada Generation, not to be confused with the A5000, P5000 and the RTX 5000 Turing Generation, is a super-powerful professional graphics card for use in laptops that sports 9,728 CUDA cores and 16 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 reasonable power consumption. The Nvidia-recommended TGP range for the card is very wide at 80 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 5000 is a GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop in disguise. Consequently, both make use of the AD103 chip and have little difficulty running triple-A games at UHD 2160p.
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 proprietary Nvidia technologies, including Optimus and DLSS 3, and they can certainly be used for various AI tasks.
The RTX 5000 features 76 RT cores of the 3rd generation, 304 Tensor cores of the 4th generation and 9,728 CUDA cores, making it a lot faster than the RTX 4000 Ada Generation. Elsewhere, the graphics card comes with 16 GB of 256-bit wide ECC GDDR6 memory for an impressive throughput of ~576 GB/s. Error correction can be turned off if desired. The fact that error correction is present here proves that the RTX 5000 is indeed targeted at professional users.
Just like Ampere-based cards, the RTX 5000 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
The average RTX 5000 Ada Generation in our extensive database is noticeably inferior to the GeForce RTX 4080 in some tests but is totally comparable to the GeForce RTX 4090 in other ones, such as the Geekbench 6.2 GPU Vulkan test.
Nvidia's marketing materials mention "up to 42.6 TFLOPS" of performance which is very impressive. The RTX 4000 Ada Generation delivers up to 33.5 TFLOPS, for reference, while the RTX 500 Ada is only good for 9 TFLOPS.
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 5000 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 5000 Ada, as the lowest value recommended for it sits at just 80 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 5000 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 5000 is built with makes for very decent energy efficiency, as of mid 2023.
Average Benchmarks NVIDIA RTX 3500 Ada Generation Laptop GPU → 100%n=44
Average Benchmarks NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU → 160%n=44
Average Benchmarks Nvidia RTX 5000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU → 165%n=44
- 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.
- Average benchmark values for this graphics card
