Feed: AnandTech
Feed Link: https://www.anandtech.com
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Title: NVIDIA Intros RTX A1000 and A400: Entry-Level ProViz Cards Get Ray
Tracing

Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2024 12:00:00 EDT
Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21352/nvidia-i...

With NVIDIA's Turing architecture turning six years old this year, the
company has been retiring many of the remaining Turing products from its
video card lineup. And today that spirit of spring cleaning is coming to the
entry-level segment of NVIDIA's professional visualization lineup, where
NVIDIA is introducing a pair of new desktop cards based on their low-end
Ampere hardware.

The new RTX A1000 and RTX A400 cards will be replacing the T1000/T600/T400
lineup, which was released three years ago in 2021. The new cards slot into
the same entry-level category and finally finish fleshing out the RTX A
series of proviz cards, offering NVIDIA's Ampere-generation professional
graphics technologies in the lowest-power, lowest-performance, lowest-cost
configuration possible.

Notably, since the entry-level T-series were based on NVIDIA's feature-
limited TU11x silicon, which lacked ray tracing and tensor core support - the
basis of NVIDIA's RTX technologies and associated branding - this marks the
first time these technologies will be available in NVIDIA's entry-level
desktop proviz cards. And accordingly, these are being promoted to RTX-
branded video cards, ending the odd overlap with NVIDIA's compute cards,
which never carry RTX branding.

It goes without saying that as low-end cards, the ray tracing performance of
either part is nothing to write home about, but it gives NVIDIA's current
proviz lineup a consistent set of graphics features from top to bottom.

NVIDIA Professional Visualization Card Specification Comparison A1000 A400
T1000 T400 CUDA Cores 2304 768 896 384 Tensor Cores 72 24 N/A N/A Boost Clock
1460MHz 1755MHz 1395MHz 1425MHz Memory Clock 12Gbps GDDR6 12Gbps GDDR6 10Gbps
GDDR6 10Gbps
GDDR6 Memory Bus Width 128-bit 64-bit 128-bit 64-bit VRAM 8GB 4GB 8GB 4GB
Single Precision 6.74 TFLOPS 2.7 TFLOPS 2.5 TFLOPS 1.09 TFLOPS Tensor
Performance 53.8 TFLOPS 21.7 TFLOPS N/A N/A TDP 50W 50W 50W 30W Cooling
Active, SS Active, SS Active, SS Active, SS Outputs 4x mDP 1.4a 4x mDP 1.4a
3x mDP 1.4a GPU GA107 TU117 Architecture Ampere Turing Manufacturing Process
Samsung 8nm TSMC 12nm Launch Date 04/2024 05/2024 05/2021 05/2021

Both the A1000 and A400 are based on the same board design, with NVIDIA doing
away with any pretense of physical feature differentiation this time around
(T400 was missing its 4th Mini DisplayPort). This means both cards are based
on the GA107 GPU, sporting different core and memory configurations.

RTX A1000 is a not-quite-complete configuration of GA107, with 2304 CUDA
cores and 72 tensor cores. This is paired with 8GB of GDDR6, which runs at
12Gbps, for a total of 192GB/second of memory bandwidth. The TDP of the card
is 50 Watts, matching its predecessor.

Meanwhile RTX A400 is far more cut down, offering about a third of the active
hardware on the GPU itself, and half the memory bandwidth. On paper this
gives it around 40% of T1000's performance, and half the memory bandwidth -
or 96GB/second. Notably, despite the hardware cut-down, the official TDP is
still 50 Watts, versus the 30 Watts of its predecessor. So at this point
NVIDIA will soon cease offering a desktop proviz card lower than 50 Watts.

As noted before, both cards otherwise feature the same physical design, with
a half-height half-length (HHHL) board with active cooling. As you'd expect
from such low-TDP cards, these are single-slot cooler designs. Both cards
feature a quartet of Mini DisplayPorts, with the same DP 1.4a functionality
that we've seen across all of NVIDIA's products for the last several years.

Finally, video-focused users will want to make note that the A1000/A400 have
slightly different video capabilities. While A1000 gets access to both of
GA107's NVDEC video decode blocks, A400 only gets access to a single block -
one more cutback to differentiate the two cards. Otherwise, both video cards
get access to the GPU's sole NVENC block.

According to NVIDIA, the RTX A1000 will be available starting today through
its distribution partners. Meanwhile the RTX A400 will hit distribution
channels in May, and with OEMs expected to begin offering the cards as part
of their pre-built systems this summer.

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