NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 Review: Turing Powered Pro Graphics

Futuremark’s VRMark is designed to test a PC’s readiness for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets. The benchmark does not, however, require that one of the headsets is attached to the PC to run and it uses an in-house graphics engine and content to ensure comparable results between different platforms. We ran the "Blue Room" VRMark test at defaults settings here, which is currently the most taxing test offered by the tool.

VRMark Blue Room Testing VR Readiness

The Quadro RTX 4000 clearly outpaces the P5000 and Radeon Pro WX 8200 here. The Turing GPU architecture is optimized for VR workloads and it shows in this test.

Although the Quadro RTX 4000 is not meant to be gaming GPU, because it is based on Turing and that game developers may use the card for their work, we decided to see how it could handle some gaming-oriented tests, including a couple that leverage DXR and NVIDIA's RTX and DLSS technologies.
 

The Quadro RTX 4000 outpaces the Radeon RX Vega 64 in the DX12-based 3DMark Time Spy test, but obviously trailed the gaming graphics cards based on today's more powerful GPUs.

3DMark's Port Royale ray-tracing benchmark can only be run on NVIDIA's Turing-based GPUs at this time. As you can see, the Quadro RTX 4000 outpaces the GeForce RTX 2060 here.

The same hold true in the Final Fantasy DLSS 4K benchmark; the Quadro RTX 4000 pulls ahead of the GeForce RTX 2060 and performs about in-line with a GeForce GTX 1080. With DLSS enabled, however, (which is only available on Turing-based GPUs), the RTX 4000 finishes well out in front of the 1080.

The Quadro RTX 4000 trailed the other cards we tested in FarCry 5, but is perfectly capable of playable framerates at Ultra settings when gaming at 1440P.

Total System Power Consumption Tested at the Outlet

Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a couple of final data points -- namely, power consumption and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored acoustics and tracked how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you an idea of how much power each graphics configuration used while idling and also while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.

Idle power is in the same ballpark for all of the test setups represented here, but load power is quite different. AMD's Vega-based GPUs are significantly more power-hungry than NVIDIA's at a given performance level, though the big, burly Turing-based flagships consume the most power under load. Getting back to the Quadro RTX 4000 specifically, load power is slightly higher than the P5000, but we are talking about a difference of only a few watts.

The relatively low power consumption of the Quadro RTX 4000 translates into a relatively quiet graphics card. While at the desktop or under light load, the Quadro RTX 4000 remains quiet and likely won't be audible over a typical CPU cooler or PSU, in a closed chassis. When under a sustained, heavy load, the card's fan does spin up significantly, however, we would still consider the card to be quiet. It is audible, but not obtrusive or loud in any way.