Announced at Nvidia’s GTC event this year, the PCIe Gen 4 ‘Ampere’ Nvidia RTX A4000 and Nvidia RTX A5000 are the replacements for the PCIe Gen 3 ‘Turing’ Nvidia
Quadro RTX 4000 and Quadro RTX 5000, which launched in 2019. And with an estimated street price of $1,000 for the Nvidia RTX A4000 and $2,250 for the Nvidia RTX A5000, they have much more palatable price tags than the Nvidia RTX A6000 which comes in at $4,650.
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The performance leap from ‘Turing’ to ‘Ampere’ (Quadro RTX 4000 to RTX A4000) is nothing short of impressive. In real-time 3D, a 45% to 60% boost, generation on generation, seems typical, with even bigger gains from real-time ray tracing when the enhanced RT and Tensor cores come into play. The step up from the four-year old ‘Pascal’ Quadro P4000 is simply phenomenal, especially for GPU rendering.
Equipping the RTX A4000 with 16 GB of memory is very significant. While we often see models / scenes that surpass 8 GB (the capacity of the previous generation Quadro RTX 4000) scenes that are 16 GB and above are certainly less common, and more the preserve of viz specialists than most architects or product designers who use standard materials and assets.
As we wait for AMD to deliver a Pro version of its
‘Big Navi’ Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs with hardware ray tracing, Nvidia’s biggest competitor in pro graphics is currently itself.
The new 12 GB ‘consumer’ GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, for example, might have half the memory of the Nvidia RTX A5000, but offers more performance on paper for half the price. Nvidia even has a GeForce Studio driver for applications including Enscape, Unreal Engine and V-Ray.
Despite the obvious attraction of Nvidia’s consumer GPUs, Nvidia’s ‘A’ class models should continue to find favour in large firms and enterprises that buy in volume, want more memory, consistent supply, pro viz features or the assurance of certification. There’s also the question of supply. As the global chip shortage continues to bite, Nvidia may well prioritise manufacture of its higher-margin pro GPUs, making GeForce even harder to get hold of.