NVIDIA has a new 48GB professional GPU. The NVIDIA RTX 5880 slots above the NVIDIA RTX 5000 Ada 32GB workstation GPU we just reviewed, and below the flagship RTX 6000 in the line. This appears to be closer to the RTX 5000 but with a bit more performance and memory.
NVIDIA RTX 5880 Ada 48GB Professional GPU Launched
Here is a quick specs comparison between the new NVIDIA RTX 5880 Ada and the cards slotted just above and below that new card in the stack.
From a compute perspective, the 14080 CUDA cores, 440 Tensor cores, and 110 RT cores are much closer to the RTX 5000 Ada generation with about a 10% bump in those specs. As a result, we see around a 6% increase in the single precision TFLOPs, RT TFLOPS, and the Tensor TFLOPS. Note NVIDIA quotes sparsity numbers with its Tensor TFLOPS.
While the compute side is much closer to the RTX 5000 Ada specs, the memory seems to be the memory subsystem of the RTX 6000 Ada. Power consumption is also much closer to the RTX 6000 Ada than to the RTX 5000 Ada.
Final Words
Overall, another new day, another new card from NVIDIA. Our guess on the positioning of this one is that NVIDIA wanted to have a card that was more in line with the RTX 5000 Ada level of performance but with the 48GB of memory. Something we noted in our RTX 5000 Ada review was that the 32GB of memory on that card felt perhaps too close to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 with 24GB, especially given the price difference. It seems like the NVIDIA RTX 5880 Ada fixes that by adding 50% more memory. Then to further differentiate the part, NVIDIA provisioned a bit more compute resources. At this end of the spectrum, it is great to see NVIDIA putting more memory on cards, especially GDDR6, because it is much less costly than HBM found on higher-end cards like the A100 and H100.
It seems like the RTX 5000 was solely released to make the 5880 seem more appealing when the RTX 6000 seemed to expensive. “Well the 6000 is too expensive, I could get the 5000 or I could pay a couple hundred more and get a GPU with the same amount of memory as the 6000”
Wasn’t this rumored to be the 6000 Ada replacement that can get through to China, like the 4090D? Curious what pricing and regional availability looks like.
CCP must be very happy to have it.