NVIDIA RTX 3500 Ada Generation Laptop GPU vs NVIDIA RTX A3000 Laptop GPU
NVIDIA RTX 3500 Ada Generation Laptop GPU
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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 RTX A3000 Laptop GPU
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The NVIDIA RTX A3000 Laptop GPU or A3000 Mobile is a professional graphics card for mobile workstations. It is based on the GA104 Ampere chip and offers a similar performance to the consumer GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU. However, it offers 256 more CUDA cores (4,096 versus 3,840) and is based on the bigger GA104 chip. The A3000 also supports PCIe 4.0 and integrates 32 RT-cores and 128 Tensor cores of the Ampere generation. It is available in different variants from 60 - 130 Watt (TGP) with different clock speeds (and performance). The GPU supports eDP 1.4b to connect the internal monitor and DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.1 for external connections.
In 2022 Nvidia released a slightly improved version of the RTX A3000 with more and faster graphics memory. The original 6 GB with 11 Gbits has been doubled to 12 GB GDDR6 clocked at 14 Gbits.
There is no more Max-Q variant (formerly used for the low power variants) but every OEM can choose to implement Max-Q technologies (Dynamic Boost, WhisperMode).
The raw performance should be similar to the GeForce RTX 3060 for laptops at the same TGP level. Both GPUs depend heavily on good cooling and a high TGP for good performance. At a similar power consumption level the RTX A3000 should be clearly faster than the old Quadro RTX 3000 and 3000 Max-Q.
The GA104 chip offers 6,144 FP32 ALUs of which half can also execute INT32 instructions (i.e. 3,072 INT32 ALUs). With Turing all shaders could still execute FP32 or INT32 instructions. The raytracing and tensor cores on the chip were also improved according to Nvidia. The A3000 only uses 4,096 of the 6,144 CUDA cores. The Ampere chips also include an improved 5th generation video encoder (NVENC for H.264 and H.265) and a 7th generation decoder (for various formats now including AV1).
The GA104 chip is manufactured by Samsung in 8nm (8N), which is not quite able to keep up with the 7nm node at TSMC (e.g. used by AMD and also for the professional GA100 Ampere chip).
| NVIDIA RTX 3500 Ada Generation Laptop GPU | NVIDIA RTX A3000 Laptop GPU | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| RTX A Series |
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| Architecture | Ada Lovelace | Ampere | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Pipelines | 5120 - unified | 4096 - unified | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Raytracing Cores | 40 | 32 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Tensor / AI Cores | 160 | 128 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Theoretical Performance | 23 TFLOPS FP32 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Memory Speed | 16000 effective = 2000 MHz | 14000 effective = 1750 MHz | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Memory Bus Width | 192 Bit | 192 Bit | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Memory Type | GDDR6 | GDDR6 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Max. Amount of Memory | 12 GB | 12 GB | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Shared Memory | no | no | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Memory Bandwidth | 432 GB/s | 264 GB/s | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| API | DirectX 12 Ultimate, Shader 6.7, OpenGL 4.6, OpenCL 3.0, Vulkan 1.3 | DirectX 12_2, Shader 6.7, OpenGL 4.6 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Power Consumption | 115 Watt (60 - 115 Watt TGP) | 130 Watt (60 - 115 Watt TGP) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| technology | 5 nm | 8 nm | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| PCIe | 4.0 x16 | 4.0 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Displays | 4 Displays (max.), HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4a | HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Notebook Size | large | large | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Date of Announcement | 21.03.2023 | 12.04.2021 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Link to Manufacturer Page | images.nvidia.com | www.nvidia.com | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Predecessor | RTX A3000 Laptop GPU | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Codename | GA104 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| TMUs | 128 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ROPs | 64 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Core Speed | 1080 - 1560 (Boost) MHz | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Transistors | 17.4 Billion | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Die Size | 392 mm² | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Features | DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.1, PCIe 4.0 x16, 12.8 SP-FP TFLOPS Peak, 102 Tensor Performance Peak, up to 264 GB/s Memory Bandwidth, Resizable BAR, Support for Modern Standby |
Benchmarks
3DM Vant. Perf. total + NVIDIA RTX A3000 Laptop GPU
specvp12 sw-03 + NVIDIA RTX 3500 Ada Generation Laptop GPU
Cinebench R15 OpenGL 64 Bit + NVIDIA RTX 3500 Ada Generation Laptop GPU
GFXBench T-Rex HD Offscreen C24Z16 + NVIDIA RTX A3000 Laptop GPU
Average Benchmarks NVIDIA RTX 3500 Ada Generation Laptop GPU → 100% n=33
Average Benchmarks NVIDIA RTX A3000 Laptop GPU → 65% n=33
- Average benchmark values for this graphics card* Smaller numbers mean a higher performance
1 This benchmark is not used for the average calculation
Game Benchmarks
The following benchmarks stem from our benchmarks of review laptops. The performance depends on the used graphics memory, clock rate, processor, system settings, drivers, and operating systems. So the results don't have to be representative for all laptops with this GPU. For detailed information on the benchmark results, click on the fps number.
Baldur's Gate 3
2023
F1 22
2022
Cyberpunk 2077 1.6
2022
F1 2021
2021
Hitman 3
2021
Cyberpunk 2077 1.0
2020
Dirt 5
2020
Watch Dogs Legion
2020
Horizon Zero Dawn
2020
Death Stranding
2020
F1 2020
2020
Gears Tactics
2020
Borderlands 3
2019
Far Cry New Dawn
2019
Strange Brigade
2018
Far Cry 5
2018
X-Plane 11.11
2018
Dota 2 Reborn
2015
The Witcher 3
2015
GTA V
2015Average Gaming NVIDIA RTX 3500 Ada Generation Laptop GPU → 100%
Average Gaming 30-70 fps → 100%
Average Gaming NVIDIA RTX A3000 Laptop GPU → 69%
Average Gaming 30-70 fps → 59%
| NVIDIA RTX 3500 Ada Generation Laptop GPU | NVIDIA RTX A3000 Laptop GPU | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| low | med. | high | ultra | QHD | 4K | low | med. | high | ultra | QHD | 4K | |||
| Cyberpunk 2077 2.2 Phantom Liberty | 121.2 | 113.1 | 101.8 | 90.3 | 60.2 | 21.3 | ||||||||
| Baldur's Gate 3 | 164.8 | 136.2 | 118.6 | 117.3 | 80.2 | 41.2 | ||||||||
| F1 22 | 228 | 223 | 182.8 | 72.9 | 48.3 | 24 | 181 | 167.5 | 120.9 | 39 | 26.2 | |||
| Tiny Tina's Wonderlands | 232.5 | 195.4 | 137.9 | 109.3 | 74.4 | 41.6 | ||||||||
| Strange Brigade | 411 | 296 | 235 | 223 | 159.2 | 78.6 | 344 | 166 | 135 | 113 | 86 | 51 | ||
| Far Cry 5 | 133 | 135 | 127 | 109 | 62 | 133 | 108 | 100 | 93 | 69 | 36 | |||
| X-Plane 11.11 | 144.6 | 137.8 | 110.9 | 92.7 | 123 | 103 | 83 | 40.5 | ||||||
| Final Fantasy XV Benchmark | 200 | 167.6 | 128.9 | 97.5 | 54.2 | 155 | 91 | 69 | 48 | 28.8 | ||||
| Dota 2 Reborn | 201 | 177.7 | 162.1 | 153.9 | 134.4 | 167 | 149 | 139 | 129 | 77.1 | ||||
| GTA V | 184.3 | 181 | 170.1 | 115.5 | 99 | 59.6 | 176 | 169 | 143 | 83 | 62 | 49.2 | ||
| NVIDIA RTX 3500 Ada Generation Laptop GPU | NVIDIA RTX A3000 Laptop GPU | |||||||||||||
| low | med. | high | ultra | QHD | 4K | low | med. | high | ultra | QHD | 4K | < 30 fps < 60 fps < 120 fps ≥ 120 fps | 9 | 1 9 | 3 7 | 5 3 | 1 6 1 | 2 4 3 1 | < 30 fps < 60 fps < 120 fps ≥ 120 fps | 7 | 3 4 | 3 4 | 1 3 1 | 1 1 3 | 1 4 1 |
For more games that might be playable and a list of all games and graphics cards visit our Gaming List
