NVIDIA RTX 2000 Ada Generation & RTX 4000 Ada Generation Linux Performance

NVIDIA recently sent over their RTX 2000 Ada Generation and RTX 4000 Ada Generation graphics cards suited for designers, engineers, and creative professionals. In my testing the past several weeks these professional graphics cards have been working out with NVIDIA's Linux driver stack -- including their open-source kernel modules now the default with the R555 driver series and later. While there is that previous article looking at how their open-source kernel drivers are at parity to the former proprietary kernel modules, today's article is looking at how the NVIDIA RTX 2000/4000 Ada Generation performance stacks up against the AMD Radeon Pro competition.

The NVIDIA RTX 2000 Ada Generation comes in a convenient half-height, dual-slot configuration with a blower fan that retails for around $625 USD as a list price but from Amazon can be found as low as $559.

The RTX 2000 Ada Generation has 16GB of GDDR6 ECC memory, four mini DisplayPort 1.4a ports, a 70 Watt power consumption rating, and rated for 12 TFLOPS single precision performance, 27.7 TFLOPS RT core performance, and 191.9 TFLOPS tensor performance.

NVIDIA's RTX 4000 Ada Generation graphics card is a full-height single slot graphics card. The RTX 4000 Ada Generation is rated for 130 Watts and features four DisplayPort 1.4a connections and 20GB of GDDR6 ECC memory while the Ada GPU boasts 6144 CUDA cores. This professional graphics card is rated for 26.7 TFLOPS single-precision performance, 61.8 TFLOPS RT core performance, and 427.8 TFLOPS tensor performance.

For this step-up in performance the NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada Generation commands a price around $1250 USD but from the PNY store on Amazon can be found as low as $865.

For comparison the RTX 2000 Ada Generation and RTX 4000 Ada Generation were compared to the AMD Radeon Pro W7500, W7600, and W7700 professional graphics cards. On the NVIDIA side was using their R555 (555.58.02) driver with their open-source driver stack on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. On the AMD side was making use of the Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 24.Q2 driver stack for having the latest compute support as of testing time. The selection of comparison graphics cards was limited by the recent professional graphics cards I had available for testing. NVIDIA did since send over an RTX 6000 Ada Generation graphics card too that will be featured in a follow-up review.