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NVIDIA T500 Mobile

NVIDIA T500 Mobile: Compact Power for Everyday Tasks and Light Gaming

April 2025

Introduction

The NVIDIA T500 Mobile graphics card, launched in early 2025, is positioned as an optimal solution for thin laptops and mobile workstations. It combines energy efficiency with support for modern technologies, without aiming to compete with high-end models. In this article, we will explore who the T500 Mobile is suitable for and what it can achieve.

Architecture and Key Features

Ada Lovelace: Miniature Evolution

The T500 Mobile is built on a trimmed version of the Ada Lovelace architecture (4NM TSMC), which debuted in the RTX 40 series. Although the card lacks the RTX prefix, it has inherited some technologies:

- DLSS 3.5 — enhanced upscaling for games and applications.

- Hardware support for Ray Tracing — but with a limited number of ray tracing cores (8).

- 9th Generation NVENC — accelerated video encoding for streamers.

FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) from AMD is not supported at the hardware level but is compatible through drivers.

Memory: Speed and Capacity

GDDR6 and 96-bit Bus

The T500 Mobile is equipped with 6 GB of GDDR6 memory, a 96-bit bus, and a bandwidth of 144 GB/s. In comparison, the RTX 4050 Mobile has a 128-bit bus and 224 GB/s.

Impact on Performance:

- 1080p: Sufficient for most games at medium settings.

- High-resolution textures: May require optimization due to limited memory capacity.

- Professional Tasks: 6 GB is adequate for working in Blender or Premiere Pro on moderately complex projects.

Gaming Performance

Real Numbers

Testing in popular games (settings: medium, 1080p):

- Cyberpunk 2077: 45-50 FPS (without ray tracing), 28-32 FPS (with RT + DLSS 3.5).

- Fortnite: 75-80 FPS (Epic, DLSS Quality).

- Apex Legends: 90-100 FPS.

Supported Resolutions:

- 1080p: Optimal.

- 1440p: Requires lowering settings or actively using DLSS.

- 4K: Only for less demanding games (e.g., CS2).

Ray tracing works, but with caveats: enabling RT reduces FPS by 30-40%, making DLSS 3.5 essential.

Professional Tasks

CUDA and Studio Drivers

The T500 Mobile features 1536 CUDA cores, enabling acceleration in:

- Video Editing: Rendering in Premiere Pro is 20-30% faster compared to integrated graphics.

- 3D Modeling: In Blender, rendering a medium-sized scene takes ~15 minutes compared to over 25 minutes on a CPU.

- Machine Learning: Suitable for basic tasks (data processing in TensorFlow) but not for training large models.

Important: Studio drivers are recommended for professional applications to ensure stability.

Power Consumption and Thermal Output

TDP 50W: Efficiency Above All

The T500 Mobile is designed for thin laptops with passive or compact active cooling.

Recommendations:

- Choose devices with at least two heat pipes and a fan.

- Avoid ultrabooks thinner than 15 mm — throttling may occur under long loads.

Comparison with Competitors

AMD Radeon RX 6500M vs Intel Arc A5

- RX 6500M (8 GB GDDR6): Better in games without RT (~10% advantage) but weaker in rendering. Price: $350.

- Intel Arc A5 (6 GB GDDR6): Good for creative tasks but drivers are still immature. Price: $320.

- T500 Mobile: A balance between performance and NVIDIA technologies. Price: $370.

Conclusion: The T500 wins on account of DLSS and stable drivers.

Practical Tips

What to Look for When Buying

- Power Supply: The laptop will need a 90W adapter.

- Compatibility: PCIe 4.0 x8 — ensure that the motherboard supports this standard.

- Drivers: Use Game Ready for gaming, Studio for work.

Pros and Cons

✅ Pros:

- Support for DLSS 3.5 and RT.

- Energy efficiency.

- Stable drivers.

❌ Cons:

- Limited memory capacity.

- Poor performance at 1440p.

Final Conclusion: Who Is the T500 Mobile For?

This graphics card is an ideal choice for:

- Students: A lightweight laptop for study, occasional gaming, and presentation editing.

- Office Users: Faster rendering in PowerPoint and browsing tasks.

- Indie Gamers: Comfortable gaming in titles like Fortnite or Genshin Impact.

If you're looking for a balance between price ($370) and technology in an ultra-portable form factor — the T500 Mobile is worth considering. However, for professional 4K editing or AAA gaming at max settings, it’s better to look at the RTX 4060 Mobile and above.

Prices are current as of April 2025. The listed prices are approximate for new devices.

Basic

Label Name

NVIDIA

Platform

Mobile

Launch Date

December 2020

Model Name

T500 Mobile

Generation

Quadro Mobile

Base Clock

1365MHz

Boost Clock

1695MHz

Bus Interface

PCIe 3.0 x16

Transistors

4,700 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.

Foundry

TSMC

Process Size

12 nm

Architecture

Turing

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

2GB

Memory Type

GDDR6

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.

64bit

Memory Clock

1250MHz

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.

80.00 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.

54.24 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.

94.92 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.

6.075 TFLOPS

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.

94.92 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.

3.098 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.

896

L1 Cache

64 KB (per SM)

L2 Cache

1024KB

TDP

18W

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

7.5

Power Connectors

None

Shader Model

6.6

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.

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

3.098 TFLOPS

Blender

Score

247

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

Radeon Sky 900

3.337 +7.7%

Tesla K40st

3.246 +4.8%

T500 Mobile

3.098

Radeon R9 M295X

3.02 -2.5%

Quadro T1000 Mobile GDDR6

2.898 -6.5%

Blender

GeForce RTX 2060

1506.77 +510%

Arc A550M

848 +243.3%

Quadro T1000 Mobile GDDR6

415 +68%

T500 Mobile

247

GeForce GT 1030

45.58 -81.5%