NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q vs NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 (Laptop) vs NVIDIA T550 Laptop GPU

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.

The Nvidia Quadro RTX 6000 for laptops is a professional high-end graphics card for big and powerful laptops and mobile workstations. It is based on the same TU102 chip as the consumer GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. Compared to the desktop RTX 6000, the mobile variant offers lower clock speeds.

The Quadro GPUs offer certified drivers, which are optimized for stability and performance in professional applications (CAD, DCC, medical, prospection, and visualizing applications). The performance in these areas is therefore much better compared to corresponding consumer GPUs.

Features

NVIDIA manufacturers the TU102 chip on a 12 nm FinFET process and includes features like Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and Real-Time Ray Tracing (RTRT), which should combine to create more realistic lighting effects than older GPUs based on the company's Pascal architecture (if the games support it). The Quadro RTX 6000 is also DisplayPort 1.4 ready, while there is also support for HDMI 2.0b, HDR, Simultaneous Multi-Projection (SMP) and H.265 video en/decoding (PlayReady 3.0).

Performance

Due to the lower clock speeds, the mobile RTX 6000 lags slightly behind the desktop version with the same name. Nvidia states for example that a desktop system using the RTX 6000 is on average 13% faster in the SPECviewperf13 4k benchmark.

Due to the extremely high power consumption of 200 Watt (TDP), the mobile Quadro RTX 6000 needs an excellent cooling solution and will be used only in big laptops.

The Nvidia T550 Laptop GPU (formerly known as Quadro T550 Mobile) for laptops is a professional mobile graphics card that is based on the Turing architecture (TU117 chip). It is based on the consumer GeForce MX550 and features the same 1024 cores and a 64 Bit memory bus. The card offers 4 GB GDDR6 with a maximum bandwidth of 112 GB/s and no dedicated display outputs (iGPU display outputs used via Optimus). The chip is manufactured in 12nm FinFET at TSMC. 

The professional GPUs offer certified drivers, which are optimized for stability and performance in professional applications (CAD, DCC, medical, prospection, and visualizing applications). The performance in these areas is therefore much better compared to corresponding consumer GPUs.

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. In contrary to the faster Quadro RTX cards, the T550 does not feature raytracing and Tensor cores.