NVIDIA RTX A4500 Laptop GPU vs NVIDIA Quadro 5010M

The NVIDIA RTX A4500 Laptop GPU or A4500 Mobile is a professional graphics card for mobile workstations. It is based on the GA104 Ampere chip and similar to the consumer GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Laptop GPU. It offers 5,888 graphics cores, 46 RT cores, 184 Tensor cores and up to 16 GB GDDR6 graphics memory with a 256 Bit memory bus. It supports PCIe 4.0 and will be available in different variants from 80 to 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 Ti laptop 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 A4500 should be clearly faster than the old RTX A4000 and Quadro RTX 4000. The desktop variant of the A4500 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 Ampere all shaders could still execute FP32 or INT32 instructions. The raytracing and tensor cores on the chip were also improved according to Nvidia. The A4500 only uses 5,888 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 5010M is a professional workstation graphics card based on the Fermi architecture (GF100 chip). Therefore, the 5010M is closely related to the  consumer GeForce GTX 480M. The Quadro 5010M is the successor to the Quadro 5000M and also offers ECC RAM and double-precision floating point cores.

The Quadro series offers certified drivers that are optimized for stability and performance in professional applications like CAD, DCC, medicine, or visualisation areas. The OpenGL performance, for example, should be significantly better than GeForce graphics cards with similar specifications.

The shader / CUDA cores can be accessed using DirectX 11 or OpenGL 4.1 for graphics rendering and DirectCompute, OpenCL, AXE, and CUDA for general purpose calculations. Due to the new Fermi architecture, the 5010M should offer higher levels of performance in general purpose calculations compared to its predecessors.

Furthermore, the Nvidia Quadro 5010M is compatible with the new stereoscopic solution by Nvidia called 3D Vision Pro.

To automatically switch between the integrated graphics card and the Quadro, the 5010M supports Nvidia Optimus. Note, however, that whether this feature is integrated or not depends on the notebook manufacturer.

Similar to the GeForce GTX 480M, the Quadro 5010M is specified at 100 Watt TDP. As a result, only very large laptops, such as the Clevo D901F, are able to house this high-end card.

At the time of arrival (Feb. 2011), the Quadro 5010M succeeds the older Quadrio FX 5000M as the fastest professional workstation graphic card for laptops.