NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU vs NVIDIA RTX 3500 Ada Generation Laptop GPU

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU (Codename GN21-X6) is a high-end laptop GPU. It is based on the AD106 chip and use the Ada Lovelace architecture. The RTX 4070 offers 4,608 cores (of the 7,680 in the AD106) and a 128 Bit memory bus. The RTX 4070 mobile uses 8 GB GDDR6 dedicated graphics memory with a clock speed of 16 Gbps (effective). 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 desktop RTX 4070 Ti uses 285 Watt for comparisons). The boost clock speed ranges from 1230 MHz (at 35 Watt TGP) up to 2175 MHz (115W). Therefore, the performance is also depending a lot on the power setting used for the RTX 4080 mobile in the laptop.

The performance should be below the desktop RTX 4070 Ti and therefore best suited for 2k and maximum details for demanding games of 2022.

Our synthetic benchmarks of an average RTX 4070 mobile show a performance slightly below a mobile RTX 3080 Ti. However, with reduced power limits, the performance is clearly suffering, e.g. only 70% in Time Spy for a version with 60W TDP. In games, a fast RTX 4070 is best suited for QHD gaming, where some very demanding games wont reach the 60 fps limit (and may have to run at 1080p, reduced settings or using DLSS). See below for detailed gaming benchmarks of various cards.

The RTX 4070 offers 144 tensor cores (4th gen) that enable DLSS 3 including frame generation for supported games. Furthermore, 36 raytracing cores (4rd gen) can be used for raytracing effects in supported games.

The AD106 chip is manufactured in 5nm at TSMC (4N process).

NVIDIA RTX 3500 Ada Generation Laptop GPU

The Nvidia RTX 3500 Ada Generation is a higher-end professional graphics card for use in laptops that sports 5,120 CUDA cores and 12 GB of ECC GDDR6 VRAM. Brought into existence in 2023, this graphics adapter leverages TSMC's 5 nm process and Nvidia's Ada Lovelace architecture to achieve higher-than-average performance combined with moderate power consumption. The Nvidia-recommended TGP range for the card is very wide at 60 W to 140 W leading to bizarre performance differences between different systems powered by what is supposed to be the same product.

Hardware-wise, the RTX 3500 is a cut-down GeForce RTX 4070 Desktop, as far as we can tell. Consequently, both make use of the AD104 chip and have little difficulty running triple-A games at QHD 1440p.

Quadro series graphics cards ship with a different BIOS and drivers than GeForce cards and are targeted at professional users rather than gaming. 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 wat 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 Nvidia technologies, including Optimus and DLSS 3, and they can certainly be used for various AI tasks.

The RTX 3500 Ada features 40 RT cores of the 3rd generation, 160 Tensor cores of the 4th generation and 5,120 CUDA cores. Multiply those numbers by 1.15 and what you get looks exactly like a desktop RTX 4070: 46, 184 and 5,888, respectively. Elsewhere, the graphics card comes with 12 GB of 192-bit wide ECC GDDR6 memory for a very healthy throughput of ~432 GB/s. Error correction can be turned off if desired. The fact that error correction is present here proves that the RTX 3500 Ada is indeed targeted at professional users.

Just like Ampere-based cards, the RTX 3500 makes use of the PCI-Express 4 protocol. 8K SUHD monitors are supported, however, DP 1.4a video outputs may prove to be a bottleneck down the line.

Performance

With its power target set to ~105 W, the RTX graphics card delivers a Blender 3.3 Classroom CUDA score of 33 seconds which is a pretty good result. Most 2024 games are playable at 2160p on High with this GPU.

Nvidia's marketing materials mention "up to 23 TFLOPS" of performance, a 15% improvement over the 20 TFLOPS that the RTX 3000 Ada Generation is supposedly good for.

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 3500 is. One other thing worth mentioning is that enabling error correction appears to reduce the amount of video memory that is available to applications and games by up to a gigabyte.

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 the case for the RTX 3500, as the lowest value recommended for it sits at just 60 W while the highest is more than two times higher at 140 W (this most likely includes Dynamic Boost). The slowest system built around an RTX 3500 Ada can easily be 60% slower than the fastest one. This is the kind of delta that we've been seeing on consumer-grade laptops featuring the latest GeForce RTX cards.

Last but not the least, the improved 5 nm process (TSMC 4N) the RTX 3500 is built with makes for very decent energy efficiency, as of mid 2023.