NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop GPU vs Nvidia RTX 5000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop GPU

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop GPU (Codename GN21-X9) is a high-end laptop GPU. It is based on the AD104 chip as the desktop RTX 4070 Ti and use the Ada Lovelace architecture. The AD104 chip offers a maximum of 7.680 shaders (e.g., the RTX 4070 Ti Desktop) from which RTX 4080 Laptop uses 7.424 and a 192 Bit memory bus. The RTX 4080 mobile uses 12 GB GDDR6 dedicated graphics memory with a clock speed of 16 or 20 Gbps (effective). The TGP (Total Graphics Power) can be configured between 60 and 150 Watt (+ 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 1350 MHz (at 60 Watt TGP) up to 2280 MHz (150W). Therefore, the performance is also depending a lot on the power setting used for the RTX 4080 mobile in the laptop.

The synthetic performance of the RTX 4080 is clearly above the mobile RTX 3080 Ti in our tests and only bested by the mobile RTX 4090. In actual games we saw that even demanding games with Raytracing enabled (like F1 23) could be played in QHD and maximum settings. Less demanding games like Baldur's Gate 3 can be fluently played in 4k (see results below).

The RTX 4080 offers 232 tensor cores (4th gen) that enable DLSS 3 including frame generation for supported games. Furthermore, 58 raytracing cores (4rd gen) can be used for raytracing effects in supported games.

The AD103 chip is manufactured in 5nm at TSMC (4N process).

Nvidia RTX 5000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU

The Nvidia RTX 5000 Ada Generation, not to be confused with the A5000, P5000 and the RTX 5000 Turing Generation, is a super-powerful professional graphics card for use in laptops that sports 9,728 CUDA cores and 16 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 great performance combined with reasonable power consumption. The Nvidia-recommended TGP range for the card is very wide at 80 W to 175 W leading to bizarre performance differences between different systems powered by what is supposed to be the same product.

Hardware-wise, the RTX 5000 is a GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop in disguise. Consequently, both make use of the AD103 chip and have little difficulty running triple-A games at UHD 2160p.

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 - 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 and 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 tasks.

The RTX 5000 features 76 RT cores of the 3rd generation, 304 Tensor cores of the 4th generation and 9,728 CUDA cores, making it a lot faster than the RTX 4000 Ada Generation. Elsewhere, the graphics card comes with 16 GB of 256-bit wide ECC GDDR6 memory for an impressive throughput of ~576 GB/s. Error correction can be turned off if desired. The fact that error correction is present here proves that the RTX 5000 is indeed targeted at professional users.

Just like Ampere-based cards, the RTX 5000 makes use of the PCI-Express 4 protocol. 8K SUHD monitors are supported, however DP 1.4a video outputs can potentially prove to be a bottleneck down the line.

Performance

The average RTX 5000 Ada Generation in our extensive database is noticeably inferior to the GeForce RTX 4080 in some tests but is totally comparable to the GeForce RTX 4090 in other ones, such as the Geekbench 6.2 GPU Vulkan test.

Nvidia's marketing materials mention "up to 42.6 TFLOPS" of performance which is very impressive. The RTX 4000 Ada Generation delivers up to 33.5 TFLOPS, for reference, while the RTX 500 Ada is only good for 9 TFLOPS.

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 5000 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 with the RTX 5000 Ada, as the lowest value recommended for it sits at just 80 W while the highest is more than two times higher at 175 W (this most likely includes Dynamic Boost). The slowest system built around an RTX 5000 Ada can easily be 60% slower than 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 RTX 5000 is built with makes for very decent energy efficiency, as of mid 2023.