NVIDIA T1200 Laptop GPU vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q

The Nvidia T1200 Laptop GPU (or Quadro T1200 for laptops) is a professional mobile graphics card that is based on the Turing architecture (TU117 chip). Compared to the consumer GTX 1650 Ti, the T1200 features more CUDA cores / shaders (1024 versus 896). The Quadro T2000 uses the same TU117 chip, but features all 1024 cores (2x to the T1000) and is therefore significantly faster. The chip is manufactured in 12nm FinFET at TSMC. The T1200 was introduced as a refresh to the Quadro T1000 together with the new Ampere RTX A workstation cards like the faster Nvidia RTX A2000.

It is available in different variants from 35 - 95 Watt (TGP) with different clock speeds (and performance). The GPU supports 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 3.0 technologies (Dynamic Boost, WhisperMode).

The Turing generation did not only introduce raytracing for the RTX cards, but also optimized the architecture of the cores and caches. According to Nvidia the CUDA cores offer now a concurrent execution of floating point and integer operations for increased performance in compute-heavy workloads of modern games.

Furthermore, the caches were reworked (new unified memory architecture with twice the cache compared to Pascal). This leads to up to 50% more instructions per clock and a 40% more power efficient usage compared to Pascal. In contrary to the faster Quadro RTX cards, the T1000 and T2000 do not feature raytracing and Tensor cores.

When configured as a slow 35W variant, the T1200 is also suited for thin and light laptops.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 with Max-Q design is the power saving variant of the mobile RTX 2080 with reduced clock speeds and power consumption. Therefore, it is suitable for thin gaming laptops. It is based on the same TU104 chip is the desktop and mobile variant and offers 2,944 shaders and 8 GB GDDR6 memory connected by a 256 bit interface (12 GHz).

Currently it looks like there will be two variants, a low power 80 Watt variant with 735 - 1095 MHz core clock and a faster 90 Watt variant with 990 - 1230 MHz core clock).

The clock is not the only difference compared to the regular RTX 2080 though. The drivers for the Max-Q version were optimized for efficiency (and not performance; only for Max-Q models), there are optimized voltage converters for 1V operation, high-end cooling methods, and a 40 dB limit for the fan noise (with clock adjustments to ensure this at all times).

Features

NVIDIA manufactures 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 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 RTX 2080 Max-Q should be slightly faster than a regular mobile RTX 2070 and therefore a high end gaming graphics card. It should be able to run all demanding games in 4k with maximum details. Raytracing features however may reduce framerates a lot.