NVIDIA RTX 2000 Ada Generation Laptop vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop GPU

NVIDIA RTX 2000 Ada Generation Laptop

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.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop GPU

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop GPU (codename GN21-X2) is a mid-range laptop GPU. It is based on the AD107 chip and uses the Ada Lovelace architecture. The RTX 4050 Laptop offers 2560 shaders and uses 6 GB GDDR6 dedicated graphics memory with a clock speed of 16 Gbps (effective) and a 96 Bit memory bus. The TGP (Total Graphics Power) can be configured between 35 and 115 Watt (+ 10-25 Watt Dynamic Boost from the CPU) leading to different performance levels. The boost clock depends on the TGP settings and ranges from 1605 MHz (35 Watt) to 2370 MHz (115 Watt). The performance therefore is also highly depending on the laptop and TDP settings.

In our benchmarks, the RTX 4050 stays slightly behind the older mobile RTX 3060 but is clearly faster than the mobile RTX 3050 Ti. Therefore, it is best suited for 1920x1080 gaming at high to ultra settings depending on the game (see benchmarks below).

The RTX 4050 offers 80 tensor cores and therefore supports DLSS 3 including frame generation that can have a big impact in supported games. The raytracing cores however will see less usage, as the RTX 4050 does not offer enough performance for high detail settings and raytracing in demanding games.

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