$1,599 RTX 4090 Beats $6,800 RTX 6000 Ada in Content Creation Review
Given its $6,800 price tag, the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada may not appear on the list of best graphics cards for gaming. But no one can deny that the RTX 6000 Ada is a powerhouse for professional users and content creators alike. The RTX 6000 Ada Generation is powered by his Nvidia flagship AD102 silicon, which the chipmaker also uses in his mainstream GeForce RTX 4090, as it’s officially known.
For the RTX 6000 Ada, Nvidia enabled 142 SMs out of a possible 144, so the graphics card is two SMs shy of using the full AD102 die. The RTX 6000 Ada features 18,176 CUDA cores, 568 Tensor cores for AI workloads, and 142 RT cores for ray tracing tasks. Capable of boosting up to 2,505 MHz, this graphics card boasts an impressive FP32 performance of up to 91.06 TFLOPs. It also comes with 48 GB of 20 Gbps GDDR6 memory onboard and features a 384-bit memory interface, allowing the graphics card to reach up to 960 GBps of memory bandwidth. However, it should be noted that the 6000 Ada’s TGP (Total Graphics Power) is limited to 300W compared to 450W for the RTX 4090 Founders Edition.
The previous RTX A6000 offered 38.71 TFLOPs FP32 performance and 768 GBps memory bandwidth. Therefore, the RTX 6000 Ada offers 135% higher FP32 performance and 25% higher memory bandwidth than the RTX A6000. With 82.58 TFLOPs FP32 performance and 1,008 GBps memory bandwidth, the GeForce RTX 4090 is probably the RTX 6000 Ada’s closest rival.
Nvidia has ported its Ada Lovelace architecture to its professional products, but AMD has yet to release a professional graphics card based on RDNA 3. Unfortunately, his 17.82 TFLOPs FP32 performance and 512 GBps memory bandwidth for the Navi 21 based graphics card looks pretty poor compared to the RTX 6000 Ada. But let’s take a look at the Puget benchmark results.
RTX 6000 Ada Benchmark
graphics card | davinci resolve studio | adobe premier pro | Topaz AI Suite | Unreal Engine | V Ray | Octane Render | redshift | blender |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
RTX 6000 Ada | 2,975 | 1,498 | 471.2 | 74.0 | 5,399 | 1,146 | 87 | 12,728 |
GeForce RTX 4090 | 2,960 | 1,505 | 465.5 | 92.5 | 5,564 | 1,292 | 85 | 12,779 |
RTX A6000 | 2,648 | 1,379 | 445.2 | 46.3 | 2,710 | 627 | 159 | 5,848 |
Radeon Pro W6800 | 2,135 | 1,017 | 401.6 | 24.7 | none | none | none | 1,982 people |
according to An In-Depth Review of Puget Systems (opens in new tab) Pro users of the RTX 6000 Ada can expect up to 2x performance from their Ada-powered graphics cards compared to their Ampere predecessors. Of course, cutting your workload time in half is always a welcome improvement. The results weren’t all that surprising as the RTX 6000 Ada’s specs alluded to, but it’s still nice to have benchmarks to quantify performance.
The GeForce RTX 4090 outperformed the RTX 6000 Ada and outperformed its professional counterpart in 6 out of 8 benchmarks. The GeForce RTX 4090 delivered 3% to 25% higher performance. As expected, the Radeon Pro W6800 did not match the RTX 6000 Ada. The latter was about 17% to 542% faster than the former, depending on the workload.
There is no doubt that the RTX 6000 Ada is a good option for professional workloads. Unfortunately, the eye-popping $6,800 suggested retail price is enough to scare potential buyers, even though the graphics card is likely to pay off in the long run. Note that none of the benchmarks benefited from Nvidia’s professional drivers. For example, Siemens NX typically see significant performance gains compared to GeForce cards.
Starting at $1,650, the GeForce RTX 4090 is an attractive option for less serious users. You lose the stability and software validation you get from Nvidia professional drivers and 24GB of VRAM. However, if you use applications that don’t require a powerful GPU and aren’t specifically unoptimized by Nvidia’s GeForce drivers, the RTX 4090 ($1,599 MSRP) costs 76% less than the RTX 6000 for its I can lend you my firepower. Ada. No wonder Nvidia doesn’t seem to want a more compact blower variant of his RTX 4090.