Awful GPU – Nvidia RTX 3050 A Laptop Specifications Revealed

Nvidia’s RTX 3050 A (Ada) GPU has been revealed, and it looks weak

Thanks to Notebookcheck, specifications for Nvidia’s RTX 3050 A laptop GPU have been revealed. Unlike the standard RTX 3050 laptop GPU, this new model from Nvidia won’t be based on Ampere silicon. This new graphics card will be based on Nvidia Ada silicon. While this sounds like an upgrade, its weakness in other areas makes us question why this new GPU exists.

With 1792 CUDA cores and 4GB of GDDR6 memory on a 64-bit memory bus, this GPU looks more like an RTX 2050 successor than a new RTX 3050 model. The standard Nvidia 3050 (Ampere) laptop GPU features 2048 CUDA cores and 4GB of GDDR6 memory over a 128-bit memory bus.

While the new A-model will benefit from Nvidia’s architectural enhancements with their Ada GPU architecture, its specs are downgraded in many areas. For starters, its memory bus is half the size of the Ampere RTX 3050 laptop GPU. Next it has fewer CUDA cores. While the latter will have its downsides countered by Ada architectural enhancement, the former is unmitigated. Even is Nvidia use faster GDDR6 memory, a 50% drop in memory bus size is a huge downgrade. That may dramatically decrease GPU performance in bandwidth-limited workloads.

Nvidia has not publicly revealed this new graphics card, and neither do we expect an official reveal. This new GPU may start shipping with new budget gaming notebooks at any time. This will make comparative testing difficult, especially if review samples are not sent to testers.

While this new GPU will likely perform similarly to existing 3050-series laptop GPUs in many workloads, this new model creates an ever more confusing laptop GPU ecosystem.

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