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

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER is a high-end desktop graphics card based on the Ada Lovelace architecture. It uses the AD104 chip and offers 7,168 cores and 12 GB GDDR6X graphics memory (192-bit bus with 21 Gbits).

The performance of the RTX 4070S lies between the older RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 Ti in the top class of high-end GPUs in 2024. Compared to AMD GPUs, the 4070 Super is similar fast as the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT. This makes the GPU best suited for QHD and maximum details of demanding games (such as Avatar Frontiers of Pandora, Allan Wake 2, Cyberpunk 2033 or F1 23). Less demanding games can also be played smoothly in 4K (AC Mirage, Cod MW 3, ...).

The AD104 chip is produced at TSMC in 5 nm (4N with EUV) and is specified with a TGP (Total Graphics Power) of 200 watts.

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.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is a high-end desktop graphics card based on the AD104 chip using the Ada Lovelace architecture. The 4070Ti offers 7,680 cores and 12 GB GDDR6X graphics memory with a 192 bit memory bus and clocked at 22.4 Gbits. The card offers a good raytracing performance thanks to the 60 dedicated raytracing cores. For AI calculations (and DLSS 3 in games), the RTX 4070 Ti has 240 Tensor cores.

The gaming performance is well suited for 4k60 gaming in most games, but for very demanding games you might have to reduce to QHD resolution. With Raytracing, lower resolutions and DLSS are crucial for playable frame rates. The performance on average is similar to the old RTX 3090 / 3090 Ti.

The AD104 chip is manufactured in the modern 5nm process at TSMC (4N with EUV) and specified with a TGP (Total Graphics Power) of 285 Watt (compared to the 450 Watt of the RTX 4090).