NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Mobile vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 4GB Laptop GPU

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 for laptops is the second fastest mobile graphics card for notebooks in early 2019. It is based on the desktop RTX 2070 but with reduced core speeds (-11% Boost, -14% Base). The memory appears to be similar clocked and sized. Therefore, the RTX2070 offers 2,304 shaders and 8 GB GDDR6 memory connected by a 256 bit interface (14 GHz, 448 GB/s).

A more power efficient "Max-Q" version is also available with further reduced clock rates.

In April 2020 Nvidia refreshed the RTX 2070 with new "Super" cards. In addition to the RTX 2070 Super Mobile with 2560 shaders, Nvidia also introduced a slightly higher clocked RTX 2070 for laptops (N18E-G1R-A1, TU106-735-A1 chip) with a 1,305 base and 1,485 MHz boost clock.

Features

NVIDIA manufacturers the TU106 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 supports it). The RTX 2070 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

The mobile RTX 2070 should perform a bit slower than the desktop RTX 2070 and therefore on par the old GTX 1080 for laptops. Therefore, it should be able to run all demanding games in 4k with high details. Raytracing features however may reduce framerates a lot.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU (mobile, NVIDIA_DEV.2583, GN20-P0) is the slowest RTX 3000 mobile card and based on the GA107 Ampere chip. It offers 2048 CUDA, 16 Ray Tracing and 64 Tensor cores. The memory bus is limited to 128 Bit and supports 4 GB of GDDR6 dedicated graphics memory.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).

In early 2023 Nvidia did refresh the RTX 3050 (GN20-P0-R) with a bigger VRAM of 6GB but reduced memory bandwidth. The 3050 6GB Laptop GPU also offers 2,560 CUDA cores as the 3050 Ti mobile.

The performance should be between the old GTX 1650 Ti and the 1660 Ti Max-Q depending on the used TGP variant. Therefore, it is best suited for full HD gaming (1920 x 1080) with high detail settings in demanding games. 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 faster RTX 3050 Ti offers 25% more cores at similar clock speeds and TGP settings. 

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).