Key Takeaways
- Nvidia's RTX 5880 Ada Generation graphics card is a cut-down version of the RTX 6000 Ada, designed for professional applications.
- The RTX 5880 offers lower performance with fewer CUDA cores and Tensor cores compared to the RTX 6000 Ada.
- The card comes with 48GB GDDR6 memory, and may be launched globally, potentially positioned between the price range of the RTX 6000 Ada and RTX 5000 Ada.
Nvidia's RTX 5880 Ada Generation graphics card is finally official a month after it was listed by the company's latest Version R535 U9 driver for professional graphics cards. It is a cut-down version of the RTX 6000 Ada, which won't be exported to certain countries, like China, due to US export restrictions. The new card offers lower performance than the RTX 6000 Ada and adheres to the US export guidelines that dictate the performance levels of cards that can be exported to restricted countries.
The RTX 5880 Ada is not a gaming GPU, and is instead a workstation graphics card designed for various professional applications, such as 3D modeling, rendering, and data visualization. It features the AD102 GPU like the RTX 6000 and RTX 4090, but with only 14,080 CUDA cores, which is significantly less than the 18,276 CUDA cores found in the RTX 6000. Another change is the 285W of total board power, which is 15W less than that of the 6000 Ada.
Name | Nvidia RTX 5880 Ada Generation Graphics Card |
|---|---|
GPU | Ada Lovelace | AD102 |
Memory | 48GB GDDR6 |
Memory interface | 384-bit |
Memory bandwidth | 960 GB/s |
CUDA cores | 14,080 |
Tensor cores | 440 |
RT cores | 110 |
Single-precision performance | 69.3 TFLOPs |
RT core performance | 160.2 TFLOPs |
Tensor performance | 1108.4 TFLOPs |
Total Board Power | 285W |
The RTX 5880 also has only 440 Tensor cores instead of the 568 in the RTX 6000, and delivers 69.3 TFLOPS of single-precision compute performance, lower than the 91.1 TFLOPS of the RTX 6000. The 1108 TFLOPS of Tensor performance is also down from the 1457 Tensor core performance of the 6000 Ada. It is clocked at 2.5 GHz and offers a maximum of 160.2 TFLOPS of RT core performance, compared to the 210.6 TFLOPs of the RTX 6000.
Despite all the differences, there are plenty of similarities between the two cards. Like the RTX 6000, the RTX 5880 comes with 48 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 384-bit interface, with a maximum bandwidth of 960 GB/s. It also retains the same video encoding and decoding support, while offering a dual-slot design with a blower-style cooler.
Overall, the RTX 5880 could be a compelling product, but it remains to be seen if it will be launched globally or if it is meant only for the Chinese market. That said, it has been listed on Nvidia's US website, so there's a good chance that it will come stateside at some stage this year. If it does, it will be interesting to see how it's priced, as that will likely determine how it fares against other top GPUs in the market. The 6000 Ada is priced at $6,800, while the 5000 Ada is priced at $4,000, so expect this to be priced somewhere in between.
