NVIDIA Quadro P4200 vs NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU

NVIDIA Quadro P4200

The Nvidia Quadro P4200 is a mobile high-end workstation graphics card for notebooks. It is based on the GP104 chip (like the consumer GeForce GTX 1070 or 1080 for laptops) and features 2304 shader cores. The clock rate is not disclosed but the theoretical SP performance is rated at 8.9 TFLOPs (for the fast Max-P version) and therefore faster than the old Quadro P5000 but below the Quadro P5200 (see table below). The P4200 is equipped with 8 GB GDDR5 which leads to 224 GB7s peak bandwidth due to the 256 Bit memory bus. There are two variants available, a Max-P performance version and a Max-Q version tuned for efficiency (with lower clock speeds).

The Quadro GPUs offer certified drivers, which are optimized for stability and performance in professional applications (CAD, DCC, medical, prospection, and visualizing applications). The performance in these areas is therefore much better compared to corresponding consumer GPUs.

Power Consumption

The power consumption of the Quadro P4200 is rated at 115 Watt TGP (max power consumption incl. memory) and therefore 15 Watt more than the Quadro P5000. The card is therefore best suited for large 17-inch notebooks.

NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU

The Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada Generation, not to be confused with the A4000, P4000 or RTX 4000 Turing Generation, is a very powerful professional graphics card for use in laptops that sports 7,424 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 great performance combined with moderate power consumption. The Nvidia-recommended TGP range for the card is very wide at 60 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 4000 is a GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop in disguise. Consequently, both make use of the AD103 chip and have little difficulty running triple-A games at QHD 1440p.

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 Nvidia technologies, including Optimus and DLSS 3, and they can certainly be used for various AI tasks.

The RTX 4000 features 58 RT cores of the 3rd generation, 232 Tensor cores of the 4th generation and 7,424 CUDA cores, making it a lot faster than the RTX 3500 Ada Generation. 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 4000 is indeed targeted at professional users.

Just like Ampere-based cards, the RTX 4000 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

With its power target set to ~130 W, the Ada Generation graphics card delivers a Blender Classroom v3.3 CUDA score of 22 seconds which is a very good result. All 2024 games are playable at 1440p with the highest settings possible on this GPU.

Nvidia's marketing materials mention "up to 33.5 TFLOPS" of performance which is pretty impressive. The RTX 5000 Ada Generation is good for a little over 42 TFLOPS, for reference.

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 4000 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 4000, as the lowest value recommended for it sits at just 60 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 4000 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 4000 Ada is built with makes for very decent energy efficiency, as of mid 2023.