NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU vs Nvidia RTX 500 Ada Generation Laptop GPU vs NVIDIA RTX 2000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU (Codename GN21-X4) is an high-end laptop GPU. It is based on the AD107 chip and uses the Ada Lovelace architecture. The RTX 4060 Laptop offers 3072 shaders and uses 8 GB GDDR6 dedicated graphics memory with a clock speed of 16 Gbps (effective) and a 128 Bit memory bus. The TGP (Total Graphics Power) can be configured between 35 and 115 Watt (+ 15-25 Watt Dynamic Boost from the CPU) leading to different performance levels. The boost clock speed ranges from 1470 MHz (at 35 Watt TGP) up to 2370 MHz (115W).

The performance in synthetical benchmarks of an average RTX 4060 is between a mobile RTX 3070 and a mobile RTX 3070 Ti. GPUs with lower power limit (e.g. 45 Watt variants) are ranking clearly lower (75% lower performance in some reviews). The average gaming performance of the RTX 4060 mobile is ideal for highest settings in 1920x1080 for demanding games. Less demanding games can easily run in QHD (like Baldurs Gate 3). See below for detailed benchmarks of our reviews. Enabling DLSS in supported games, can highly improve the framerate.

The RTX 4060 offers 80 tensor cores (4th gen) that enable DLSS 3 including frame generation for supported games. The 20 raytracing cores (4rd gen) on the other hand, will see less use as the RTX 4060 is not that powerful for demanding games to enable raytracing (other than in low resolutions).

The AD107 chip is manufactured in 5nm at TSMC (4N process).

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 [the second figure includes the Dynamic Boost, it seems] leading to noticeable performance differences between different systems powered by what is supposed to be the same graphics card.

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, 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; 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

At 50 W (35 W + 15 W Dynamic Boost), the graphics card can handle most 2023 and 2024 games like Baldur's Gate 3 at 1080p on high graphics settings. With a Geekbench 6.2 OpenCL GPU score of 61,500 points and a Blender v3.3 Classroom CUDA score of 71 seconds, it's clear the Ada is so much faster than any integrated GPUs on the market including the 890M.

Power consumption

With the latest Nvidia graphics cards, laptop makers are free to set the TGP according to their needs within a fairly wide range. With the RTX 500 Ada, we have the lowest value recommended sitting at just 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 AD107 chip is built with makes for decent energy efficiency, as of early 2024.

NVIDIA RTX 2000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU

The Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU, not to be confused with the A2000, P2000 or T2000, is a mid-range professional graphics card for use in laptops that sports 3,072 CUDA cores and 8 GB of GDDR6 VRAM. It would be fair to say that this is a GeForce RTX 4060 (Laptop) in disguise; consequently, the former is powered by the same AD107 chip as the latter, and is fast enough to handle any triple-A game at 1080p with Ultra quality settings. Brought into existence in 2023, the RTX 2000 leverages TSMC's 5 nm process and Nvidia's Ada Lovelace architecture to achieve very decent performance combined with moderate power consumption. The Nvidia-recommended TGP range for the card is very wide at 35 W to 140 W leading to bizarre performance differences between different systems powered by what is supposed to be the same product.

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, 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 way is employed to determine what is transparent and what isn't), 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 applications.

The RTX 2000 features 24 RT cores of the 3rd generation, 96 Tensor cores of the 4th generation and 3,072 CUDA cores. Increase those numbers by 50%, and you get an RTX 3000 Ada Generation - as long as we disregard clock speed differences, of course. Unlike costlier Ada Generation professional laptop graphics cards, the RTX 2000 comes with 8 GB of non-ECC VRAM; the lack of error correction makes this card less suitable for super-important tasks and round-the-clock operation. Much like it is with the RTX 3000 Ada Generation, the VRAM is 128-bit wide and delivers a decent bandwidth of ~256 GB/s.

The RTX 2000 Ada Generation makes use of the PCI-Express 4 protocol, just like Ampere-based cards. 8K SUHD monitors are supported, however, DP 1.4a video outputs can potentially prove to be a bottleneck down the line.

Performance

Most 2024 games are playable at 1440p on High with this GPU. That being said, the average RTX 2000 Ada in our extensive database is much closer to the RTX 4050 Laptop than it is to the RTX 4060 Laptop.

Nvidia's marketing materials mention "up to 14.5 TFLOPS" of performance, a significant downgrade compared to 20 TFLOPS delivered by the RTX 3000 Ada Generation.

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 2000 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. This is especially the case for the RTX 2000, as the lowest value recommended for it sits at just 35 W while the highest is 300% higher at 140 W. The slowest system built around an RTX 2000 Ada can easily be half as fast as 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 Ada graphics card is built with makes for very decent energy efficiency, as of mid 2023.