NVIDIA RTX A4000 Laptop GPU vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Super Max-Q vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super Mobile

The NVIDIA RTX A4000 Laptop GPU or A4000 Mobile is a professional graphics card for mobile workstations. It is based on the GA104 Ampere chip and similar to the consumer GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU. It offers the same 5.120 graphics cores, 40 RT cores, 160 Tensor cores and 8 GB GDDR6 graphics memory with a 256 Bit memory bus. It supports PCIe 4.0 and will be available in different variants from 80 - 140 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.

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 3070 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 A4000 should be clearly faster than the old Quadro RTX 4000 and 4000 Max-Q. The desktop variant of the A4000 however, is a lot faster.

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 A4000 only uses 5,120 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 GeForce RTX 2080 Super Mobile is the fastest mobile graphics card for laptops in early 2020. It is based on the desktop RTX 2080 Super, but most likely with reduced core speeds. According to early information it will be only slightly faster than a RTX 2080 with the same TGP setting (max. 200 Watt).

Features

NVIDIA manufacturers the TU104 chip on a 12 nm FinFET process and includes features like Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and Real-Time Ray Tracing (RTRT), which should combine to create more realistic lighting effects than older GPUs based on the company's Pascal architecture (if the games supports it). The RTX 2080 Super is also DisplayPort 1.4 ready, while there is also support for HDMI 2.0b, HDR, Simultaneous Multi-Projection (SMP) and H.265 video en/decoding (PlayReady 3.0).

Performance

The mobile RTX 2080 Super Mobile should perform only slightly better than the old mobile RTX 2080. Therefore, it should be able to run all demanding games in 4k with maximum details. Raytracing features however may reduce framerates a lot.

The power consumption of the card can be set with 150 or 200 Watt TGP according to early information. Therefore, the normal Max-P variant is only suited for thick and heavy gaming laptops. A Max-Q variant for thin and light laptops is also planned (most likely at 80 - 90 Watt as the RTX 2080 Max-Q with similar performance).