Nvidia RTX 500 Ada Generation Laptop GPU vs Intel HD Graphics (Ivy Bridge)

Nvidia RTX 500 Ada Generation Laptop GPU

The Nvidia RTX 500 Ada Generation, not to be confused with the A500, P500 and the T500, is a lower-end professional graphics card for use in laptops that sports 2,048 CUDA cores and a paltry 4 GB of GDDR6 VRAM. We believe this graphics card to be a heavily cut-down GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop; therefore, both should employ the Ada Lovelace AD107 chip built with TSMC's 5 nm process. The RTX 500 was launched in February 2024. The Nvidia-recommended TGP range for this graphics card is moderately wide at 35 W to 60 W [the second figure includes the Dynamic Boost, it seems] leading to noticeable performance differences between different systems powered by what is supposed to be the same graphics card.

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; under-the-hood refinements are plentiful, including an immensely larger L2 cache, 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 applications.

The RTX 500 Ada features 16 RT cores of the 3rd generation, 64 Tensor cores of the 4th generation and 2,048 CUDA cores. Increase those numbers by 25%, and you get the RTX 1000 Ada - as long as we pay no attention to clock speed differences, of course. Unlike costlier Ada Generation professional laptop graphics cards, the RTX 500 comes with just 4 GB of non-ECC VRAM; the lack of error correction makes this card less suitable for super-important tasks and round-the-clock operation. The VRAM is just 64-bit wide, delivering an anemic bandwidth of ~128 GB/s.

The RTX 500 Ada Generation makes use of the PCI-Express 4 protocol, just like Ampere-based cards did. 8K SUHD monitors are supported, however, DP 1.4a video outputs may prove to be a bottleneck down the line.

Performance

At 50 W (35 W + 15 W Dynamic Boost), the graphics card can handle most 2023 and 2024 games like Baldur's Gate 3 at 1080p on high graphics settings. With a Geekbench 6.2 OpenCL GPU score of 61,500 points and a Blender v3.3 Classroom CUDA score of 71 seconds, it's clear the Ada is so much faster than any integrated GPUs on the market including the 890M.

Power consumption

With the latest Nvidia graphics cards, laptop makers are free to set the TGP according to their needs within a fairly wide range. With the RTX 500 Ada, we have the lowest value recommended sitting at just at 35 W while the highest value is 60 W [this most likely includes Dynamic Boost]. Real-world performance of the slowest RTX 500 Ada will probably be around 40% lower than that of the fastest one.

Last but not the least, the improved 5 nm process (TSMC 4N) the AD107 chip is built with makes for decent energy efficiency, as of early 2024.

Intel HD Graphics (Ivy Bridge)

The Intel HD Graphics (Ivy Bridge) is an integrated graphics card in the mobile Ivy Bridge codenamed processors (Celeron and Pentium). It is the successor the the Intel HD Graphics 2000 in the Sandy Bridge CPUs and performs between the old HD 2000 and 3000 GPU. 

Compared to the faster HD Graphics 4000, the HD Graphics features less Execution Units (6 versus 16) and only one texture sampler. Therefore, the performance is clearly worse and only suited for low demanding gaming. Intel states a 10 to 15% higher performance compared to the old Sandy Bridge based HD Graphics 2000 (see our benchmarks below), which is similar to AMDs low-end GPUs like the integrated Radeon HD 8210. Therefore, only casual games with low requirements are playable.

A speciality of the Ivy Bridge GPUs is that 4x MSAA is supported in hardware now. However, 2x is only supported through software.  The algorithm to support 2x is going through the 4x pipeline with a software algorithm, so performance is similar to 4x MSAA.

The integrated video decoder called Multi Format Codec Engine (MFX) was also improved and should allow even simultaneus 4K video decoding. DXVAChecker lists MPEG2, VC1, WMV9, and H264 as supported codecs. QuickSync for fast transcoding of videos was also optimized for higher performance and better image quality.

Another new feature is the support for up to 3 independent displays (maybe only with a DisplayPort) as AMD offers with theirs Eyefinity support (up to 6 displays).

Due to the 22nm 3D Tri-Gate production process, the power consumption should be relatively low (the development was focused on performance per Watt).