NVIDIA Quadro M4000M vs NVIDIA RTX A3000 Laptop GPU vs NVIDIA Quadro 4000M

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).

The NVIDIA Quadro 4000M is a professional workstation graphics card based on the Fermi architecture (or more specifically, probably the GF104). Unlike the 5010M, the 4000M does not support ECC memory and dual-precision (DP) floating point calculations.

The Quadro series offers certified drivers that are optimized for stability and performance in professional applications such as CAD or DCC. As a result, multiple scientific or business disciplines can make use of the workstation GPU. The OpenGL performance, for example, should be significantly better than consumer-oriented GeForce graphics cards of similar specifications.

The shader / CUDA cores can be accessed using DirectX 11 or OpenGL 4.1 for graphics rendering or DirectCompute, OpenCL, AXE, and CUDA for general purpose calculations. Due to the new Fermi core, the 4000M should offer higher performance in general purpose calculations compared to its predecessors.

Furthermore, the Nvidia Quadro 4000M is compatible with 3D Vision Pro, a new software solution by Nvidia for stereoscopic output.

The 4000M supports Nvidia Optimus in order to automatically switch between the integrated graphics card and the Quadro for power-saving purposes. Whether or not this feature is supported on a laptop, however, is dependent on the laptop manufacturer.

Similar to the GeForce GTX 480M, the Quadro 4000M is specified at 100 Watt TDP and is therefore only found in large laptops such as the Clevo D901F.