Monday, May 15th 2023
NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada Lovelace GPU Roughly Equivalent to GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, Consumes 65% Less Power
The NVIDIA RTX 4000 SFF Ada Generation graphics card was released to the public in late April, but very few reviews and benchmarks have emerged since then. Jisaku Hibi, a Japanese hardware site, has published an in-depth evaluation that focuses mostly on gaming performance. The RTX 4000 Ada SFF has been designed as a compact workstation graphics card, but its usage of an AD104 die makes it a sibling of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4070 and 4070 Ti gaming-oriented cards. Several PC hardware sites have posited that the 70 W RTX 4000 Ada SFF would "offer GeForce RTX 3070-like performance," but Jisaku Hibi's investigation points to the RTX 3060 Ti being the closest equivalent card (in terms of benchmark results).
According to the TPU GPU database: "NVIDIA has disabled some shading units on the RTX 4000 SFF Ada Generation to reach the product's target shader count. It features 6144 shading units, 192 texture mapping units, and 80 ROPs. Also included are 192 tensor cores which help improve the speed of machine learning applications. The card also has 48 ray tracing acceleration cores. NVIDIA has paired 20 GB GDDR6 memory with the RTX 4000 SFF Ada Generation, which are connected using a 160-bit memory interface. The GPU is operating at a frequency of 1290 MHz, which can be boosted up to 1565 MHz, memory is running at 1750 MHz (14 Gbps effective)." The SKU's 70 W TGP and limited memory interface are seen as the card's main weak points, resulting in average clock speeds and a maximum memory bandwidth of only 280 GB/s.
Jisaku Hibi's benchmark tests show that the RTX 4000 SFF performs nearest to the Ampere-based (GA104) GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, while consuming 65% less power. The older card was a bit faster, by a maximum 13% margin, but its total graphics power (TGP) is 200 W. The RTX 4000 SFF's newer architecture allows for impressive efficiency, and it beats the RTX 3060 (non-Ti) 170 W card by a 20% margin. It cannot keep pace with the substantially larger and power hungry RTX 3070 and 4070 GPUs.
It is good to know that the small form factor RTX 4000 GPU is versatile beyond its core purpose - but the high asking price ($1250-1500) makes it a sensible choice for visual professional-type buyers only.
Sources:
Jisaku Hibi, Tom's Hardware
According to the TPU GPU database: "NVIDIA has disabled some shading units on the RTX 4000 SFF Ada Generation to reach the product's target shader count. It features 6144 shading units, 192 texture mapping units, and 80 ROPs. Also included are 192 tensor cores which help improve the speed of machine learning applications. The card also has 48 ray tracing acceleration cores. NVIDIA has paired 20 GB GDDR6 memory with the RTX 4000 SFF Ada Generation, which are connected using a 160-bit memory interface. The GPU is operating at a frequency of 1290 MHz, which can be boosted up to 1565 MHz, memory is running at 1750 MHz (14 Gbps effective)." The SKU's 70 W TGP and limited memory interface are seen as the card's main weak points, resulting in average clock speeds and a maximum memory bandwidth of only 280 GB/s.
27 Comments on NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada Lovelace GPU Roughly Equivalent to GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, Consumes 65% Less Power
This seems to be the new way to stretch out product skus while they partner with board manufacturers to pump out 10 versions of the same card. I said to another guy on here, Im not into playing the game they set up, I will wait. They capitalize on impatient people. Don't give them what they want, which is for you to run out and but the first thing they show you, and then after that they show you the one that has enough ram on it, and you buy that too. So Ill end by stating that the 3060 12GB model, in most situations, is the optimal pick. And if you don't know how to make a 3060 with 12 gigabytes work for you? Then I'm sorry but you are no so good at computer stuff.
My stuff
5600x
16 GB 3600 xmp
x570
wd sn770 1tb
evga 1660 super oc 6gb
Performance/watt is best in class, and although clearly not as fast as the best gaming 4x series, it is good for HD, 2.5K in all cases, and 4K in some. That's pretty impressive as well as providing all the Quadro-purposed CUDA and professional encoding video attributes.
Not too noisy, low power, can put two into the same PC/workstation.
Unfortunately, at a "professional price". ooof.
There is no reason said GPUs could not be packaged into desktop cards. Nobody was willing to do it.
Rtx a2000 is around 3050/3060 none TI performance for a msrp of 450 usd. Rtx 4000 ssf is 3060 TI/3070 for triple the price or 1250 usd msrp. Just to put it in to a perspective. Sure you do pay some of it with 20 GB vram. But still, it's a very expensive card for the performance you get regardless of it low power consumption.
Maybe sometime in the future when it is used a price has come down to a acceptable level I might jump on it. But for now, it's to expensive for the performance you get just for gaming at least.
If you are after a low power SFF slot powered gpu. I would rather recommend a2000. Much more reasonable price now it is used amd for sale. Gaming performance aren't that bad either. It handle dead island 2 just fine example.
"Ada, what could have been"
after
"Ampere, what could have been"
and...
"RDNA3... what could have been"
Man...
blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/08/10/rtx-a2000/
The ACTUAL launch price of the A2000 was $799. $999 for the 12GB version. After about 18 months the prices came way down to $250-300 on ebay for one. The launch was also only a few months into the hyperinflationary spiral we are in today, that is going to play a major factor.Well yeah, going from 6GB to 20GB of ECC VRAM is going to cost you a huge penny. And you are paying for pro tier drivers, not consumer drivers. Those dont come cheap, and they are factored into the price of the card itself.This has always been, and always will be, the trend with pro cards for home users. Same thing applied to quaddro for over a decade.The A2000 is good, and if you have one, upgrading to the A4000 will never make sense. The next gen up never does.
Have you ever heard of correlation does not equal causation? someone who wants a slot powered GPU does not, in any way, care about the 4090. All they care about is how well the new cards in the appropriate TDP range perform compared to their predecessor.
What ratio, in your mind, produces proper results? At what ratio does the low end fall off? ?There has to be something backing this idea up, right?
If there's such a big market for 75W GPUs then where is the 30 series one? With such demand, Nvidia should surely have made one.
My assumption is that performance is too low relative to the 3050 (already not known as a good value which is bad at the low end) to make one worth selling for the price to make it. Ie.: getting the power down to 75W while maintaining enough performance and margins to make a viable product is a problem. Not a technical, just marketing. Seeing the sales of the 1650 vs the 1650 Super could have answered that question for Nvidia but I don't know those numbers. $10 more for 33% more performance seems worth considering a power supply replacement for.
Or it's just that 75W gamers are easy to satisfy with older lower-end parts. If the 1650 is selling enough to make it the top card on the Steam survey, then why make a new one?Forgot this: That's a large die for a low-power and entry-level GPU, larger than the 3050 and the same one that the 3060 uses. There's no way Nvidia would sell a 3060 die GPU for less than a 3050. The 3040 or whatever needs to exist cut from the 3050 die with 2048 Cores, maybe slower GDDR6 and 75W. Maybe once all the 4000 series releases we'll see something like that but it should have been made already. Again I assume this is a profit thing, there's not enough demand vs the 3050 to satisfy someone in marketing.
RTX A4000 vs RTX 4000 ADA
I've already made more than one build with the RTX A2000, I'm waiting for a waterblock right now, hopefully it will be compatibile with the RTX 4000 SFF (externally they look the same), but I doubt it.
Looking forward to grab one of those as soon as price come down to not-insane territory.
There are graphics card usage cases that aren't gaming.
If it doesn't say GeForce, it's probably not intended for consumers. Consumer usage cases are only a subset of the entirety of applications for GPUs.
The performance-per-dollar metric for this SKU isn't aligned for the consumer gaming marketplace. The fact that you find the device unappealing as a PC gaming component is deliberate. After all, it would be stupid for a manufacturer to market a pro card that's identical in specs and performance to an AIB's consumer product at three times the price.
www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-3050-8-gb.c3858
133W Gaming power as tested at TPU:
www.techpowerup.com/review/msi-geforce-rtx-3050-gaming-x/36.htmlThen where is the new hardware? Why isn't it being made?A larger die on a newer, more expensive node = $$. Same can happen with a possible 75W Ada GPU though the node shrink should be more significant this time but also more expensive again. If the 1650 sells for $155+ on a cheap node, what will a 75W Ada sell for? I hope they make one but the price may be prohibitively expensive for upgrading slot powered computers looking for a cheap GPU.
But, I can aspire in a year (or two?) to drop in a 14700k and an rtx 4000 ada, once the prices have moderated.
I’m new to pcs and components; any ideas on what the (downward) pricing curves will look like for these components, gpu especially? Say, for that gpu to hit sub-$500 — are we talking 12 months? 18? Longer…?!