RTX Pro vs. GeForce RTX: This Lenovo laptop shows why the Pro GPU is worth it

Everyone who knows anything about PCs knows this brand: Nvidia GeForce RTX. It is THE name when it comes to GPUs (sorry, AMD Radeon and Intel ARC), with Nvidia dominating the market almost like a monopoly in recent years.

However, many consumers may not be aware that the GeForce RTX GPUs are not the only graphics cards that Nvidia makes for the PC market. There also is Nvidia's second brand, the professional GPUs of the Nvidia RTX Pro series. These graphics cards were once marketed as Nvidia Quadro, and they are the backbone of most mobile workstation laptops on the market.

Take, for example, the Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 3, a mobile workstation we recently reviewed. This powerful 16-inch laptop contains an Nvidia RTX Pro 3000 Blackwell, which roughly corresponds to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. We also tested a ThinkPad T16g Gen 3, a Lenovo laptop that is based on the same design as the ThinkPad P16, but uses Nvida GeForce GPUs instead - we reviewed it with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080.

Despite the RTX 5080 being rated as an overall faster GPU, the RTX Pro showed its quality in the workstation specific test, the SPECviewperf 2020 suite. This is a test of various different CAD benchmarks.

Overall, the ThinkPad P16 outperformed the ThinkPad T16g by around 67 percent - a stark difference, which shows why for some customers, choosing the RTX Pro brand instead of GeForce can definitely be worth it. The chips may be similar technically, but driver optimization for CAD can sometimes make all the difference.