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.

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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.

RTX Ada Generation Laptop GPU Series NVIDIA RTX 5000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU 9728 @ 0.93 - 1.68 GHz 256 Bit @ 20000 MHz NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU 7424 192 Bit @ 16000 MHz NVIDIA RTX 3500 Ada Generation Laptop GPU 5120 192 Bit @ 16000 MHz NVIDIA RTX 3000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU 4608 128 Bit @ 16000 MHz NVIDIA RTX 2000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU 3072 128 Bit @ 16000 MHz Nvidia RTX 1000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU 2560 96 Bit @ 16000 MHz Nvidia RTX 500 Ada Generation Laptop GPU 2048 64 Bit @ 12000 MHz
Architecture	Ada Lovelace
Pipelines	2048 - unified
TMUs	64
ROPs	32
Raytracing Cores	16
Tensor / AI Cores	64
Memory Speed	12000 effective = 1500 MHz
Memory Bus Width	64 Bit
Memory Type	GDDR6
Max. Amount of Memory	4 GB
Shared Memory	no
Memory Bandwidth	128 GB/s
API	DirectX 12 Ultimate, Shader 6.7, OpenGL 4.6, OpenCL 3.0, Vulkan 1.3
Power Consumption	60 Watt (35 - 60 Watt TGP)
technology	5 nm
PCIe	4.0 x16
Displays	4 Displays (max.), HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4a
Notebook Size	medium sized
Date of Announcement	27.02.2024
Link to Manufacturer Page	images.nvidia.com

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