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NVIDIA P102 101

NVIDIA P102 101 Graphics Card: Overview and Capability Analysis in 2025

Introduction

The NVIDIA P102 101 graphics card, introduced in early 2024, is positioned as an affordable solution for gamers and professionals seeking a balance between price and performance. Although this model does not belong to the flagship RTX 40 series, it attracts attention due to its optimized architecture and support for modern technologies. In this article, we will explore who the P102 101 is suitable for and what tasks it can handle in 2025.

1. Architecture and Key Features

Architecture: The P102 101 is based on the updated microarchitecture Ada Lovelace Lite — a simplified version of the flagship Ada Lovelace. This allows NVIDIA to lower production costs while retaining the key advantages of the new architecture.

Manufacturing Technology: The chip is fabricated using TSMC’s 5nm process, providing high energy efficiency and compactness.

Unique Features:

- DLSS 3.5: Support for enhanced AI-driven upscaling to increase FPS in 4K gaming.

- FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR): Compatibility with AMD's open technologies, which is rare for NVIDIA cards.

- No RT Cores: Ray tracing is handled via software emulation, reducing performance in RT modes.

2. Memory: Type, Volume, and Impact on Performance

Memory Type: GDDR6 with a 192-bit bus.

Volume: 12 GB — sufficient for 4K gaming and handling heavy projects in 3D editing software.

Bandwidth: 384 GB/s. For comparison, the RTX 4060 Ti (288 GB/s) underperforms against the P102 101 in tasks requiring high bandwidth, such as texture rendering.

Practical Impact:

- In games with Ultra textures (e.g., Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty), the graphics card demonstrates stable performance due to its large memory capacity.

- When working in Blender or DaVinci Resolve, 12 GB allows for processing complex scenes without needing to load data from disk.

3. Gaming Performance

Average FPS (2025, Ultra Settings):

- 1080p: Starfield: Enhanced Edition — 85 FPS, GTA VI — 92 FPS.

- 1440p: The Elder Scrolls VI — 65 FPS, Call of Duty: Black Ops V — 78 FPS.

- 4K: Forza Horizon 6 — 48 FPS (with DLSS 3.5 — 72 FPS).

Ray Tracing: Due to the lack of hardware support for RT cores, enabling RT reduces FPS by 40-50%. For example, in Alan Wake 3 at 1440p with active RT, the performance drops from 60 to 35 FPS.

Advice: For comfortable 4K gaming with ray tracing, it’s better to choose the RTX 4070, but the P102 101 can handle tasks if using DLSS or FSR.

4. Professional Tasks

CUDA and OpenCL:

- 3840 CUDA cores provide high rendering speeds in Blender (about 15% faster than the RTX 3060).

- Support for OpenCL 3.0 makes the card suitable for scientific calculations, such as in MATLAB or ANSYS.

Video Editing: In Adobe Premiere Pro 2025, rendering an 8K video takes about 22 minutes, comparable to the RTX 4070.

Limitations: The lack of hardware AV1 encoding is a downside for streamers.

5. Power Consumption and Thermal Performance

TDP: 160 W — a modest figure for a card of this class.

Recommendations:

- Cooling: A system with dual 90mm fans handles the load, but noise reaches 38 dB under load. For quieter operation, consider liquid cooling solutions from Arctic or NZXT.

- Case: Minimum volume — 30 liters with 3-4 fans for adequate ventilation.

6. Comparison with Competitors

NVIDIA RTX 4060 ($330):

- Better at RT tasks (+30% FPS) but lags in rendering (-20%).

- Less memory volume (8 GB).

AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT ($350):

- Higher 4K performance without RT (+15%), but poorer optimization for professional applications.

Conclusion: The P102 101 ($320) excels against competitors in price/performance ratio for non-gaming tasks.

7. Practical Tips

- Power Supply: At least 500 W with an 80+ Bronze certification (e.g., Corsair CX550).

- Compatibility: PCIe 4.0 x16, may require motherboard upgrades for older PCs (pre-2021).

- Drivers: Regularly update GeForce Experience — NVIDIA actively optimizes the P102 101 for new games.

8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Optimal price ($320) for 12 GB GDDR6.

- Support for DLSS 3.5 and FSR 3.0.

- Low power consumption.

Cons:

- No hardware ray tracing.

- Noisy cooling system.

9. Final Conclusion

The NVIDIA P102 101 is a solid choice for:

- Gamers playing at 1440p or 4K with DLSS/FSR.

- Professionals needing large memory capacity for rendering and editing.

- Budget-conscious PC owners looking to leverage modern technologies.

If you are willing to sacrifice ray tracing for savings of $150-200, the P102 101 will be a reliable option for the next 2-3 years. However, for future games focusing on ray tracing, it’s better to consider the RTX 4060 Ti or AMD RX 7700 XT.

Prices are current as of April 2025. The listed cost pertains to new devices in retail outlets in the USA.

Basic

Label Name

NVIDIA

Platform

Desktop

Launch Date

January 2018

Model Name

P102 101

Generation

Mining GPUs

Base Clock

1557MHz

Boost Clock

1670MHz

Bus Interface

PCIe 3.0 x4

Transistors

11,800 million

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

200

Foundry

TSMC

Process Size

16 nm

Architecture

Pascal

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

10GB

Memory Type

GDDR5

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

320bit

Memory Clock

2002MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

320.3 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

133.6 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

334.0 GTexel/s

FP16 (half)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy.

167.0 GFLOPS

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

334.0 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

10.904 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

SM Count

Multiple Streaming Processors (SPs), along with other resources, form a Streaming Multiprocessor (SM), which is also referred to as a GPU's major core. These additional resources include components such as warp schedulers, registers, and shared memory. The SM can be considered the heart of the GPU, similar to a CPU core, with registers and shared memory being scarce resources within the SM.

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

3200

L1 Cache

48 KB (per SM)

L2 Cache

0MB

TDP

250W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

1.3

OpenCL Version

3.0

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 (12_1)

CUDA

6.1

Power Connectors

2x 8-pin

Shader Model

6.4

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.

Suggested PSU

600W

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

10.904 TFLOPS

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

Xbox Series X GPU

11.907 +9.2%

Radeon RX 6700M

11.281 +3.5%

P102 101

10.904

P102 100

10.555 -3.2%

PG506 242

10.114 -7.2%