NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Mobile vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPU

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 for laptops is the fastest mobile graphics card for notebooks in early 2019. It is based on the desktop RTX 2080 but with reduced core speeds (-7% Boost, -9% Base). The memory appears to be similar clocked and sized. Therefore, the RTX2080 offers 2,944 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 planned with further reduced clock rates.

Features

NVIDIA manufacturers the TU104 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 2080 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 2080 should perform a bit slower than the desktop RTX 2080 and therefore definitely faster than the old GTX 1080 for laptops. Therefore, it should be able to run all demanding games in 4k with maximum details. Raytracing features however may reduce framerates a lot.

The power consumption of the card was reduced from 215 Watt for the desktop RTX 2080 to 150 Watt. However, it is still only suited for thick and heavy gaming laptops. For thinner and lighter designs, the Max-Q variant of the RTX 2080 is intended that can be configured at 80 or 90 Watt (at much lower clock speeds).

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPU (for laptops, NVIDIA_DEV.2583, GN20-P1) is a faster variant of the RTX 3050 mobile card and based on the GA107 Ampere chip. The chip offers 2560 CUDA, 20 Ray Tracing and 80 Tensor cores. The clock rate depends on the used TGP-version (from 35 - 80 Watt).

The performance (of the high TGP variants) should be similar to the old RTX 2060 and therefore most suited for 1080p gaming with high detail 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 a performance boost with a 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 Ti 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).