NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Mobile vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER Comparison

The database records a stark gap between these two NVIDIA GPUs: a desktop Ada Lovelace card sitting at the 83rd percentile of all recorded GPUs, and an entry-level Ampere laptop part at the 78th percentile. Both are end-of-life products, but they were built for entirely different jobs. The RTX 4070 SUPER swept all three head-to-head benchmarks, winning by margins that range from large to overwhelming, and the recorded data makes clear this is not a close contest in any workload the two share.

The Verdict

The data shows a clean sweep: the RTX 4070 SUPER wins 3 of 3 shared benchmarks, with no test in which the RTX 3050 Mobile comes out ahead. Anyone choosing between the two for gaming or GPU compute should pick the 4070 SUPER on pure performance grounds, full stop. Its 3DMark Steel Nomad score of 4627 against 421, an advantage recorded at 999 percent, means roughly eleven times the DirectX 12 throughput in that test.

The RTX 3050 Mobile argues for itself on characteristics the benchmarks do not capture directly: a 45 W TDP, no power connectors, an integrated form factor, and portable-device-dependent outputs. In other words, it exists inside laptops, while the 4070 SUPER is a dual-slot desktop card drawing 220 W through a 16-pin connector and requiring a suggested 550 W PSU. If the choice is dictated by platform, desktop versus laptop, the decision makes itself. If both are feasible, every measured result favors the desktop card.

FAQ

Q: How large is the performance gap across the shared benchmarks?

A: The RTX 4070 SUPER leads by 999 percent in 3DMark Steel Nomad (4627 vs 421), 245.3 percent in Geekbench OpenCL (172795 vs 50038), and 319.2 percent in Geekbench Vulkan (205624 vs 49051).

Q: Where does each GPU sit relative to all GPUs in the database?

A: The RTX 4070 SUPER ranks at the 83rd percentile; the RTX 3050 Mobile sits at the 78th percentile.

Q: Which rivals are closest to each card?

A: The 4070 SUPER is within a fraction of a percent of the Quadro M6000 24 GB, RTX 5050 Mobile, and Quadro M6000, and 1 percent behind the RTX 4090 Mobile. The 3050 Mobile is essentially tied with the NVIDIA T550 Mobile, marginally behind the AMD Radeon Pro 570, and slightly ahead of the P104-100 and T600 Mobile.

Q: How do the memory configurations compare?

A: The 4070 SUPER has 12 GB of GDDR6X on a 192-bit bus with 504.2 GB/s of bandwidth; the 3050 Mobile has 4 GB of GDDR6 on a 128-bit bus with 192.0 GB/s.

Q: What was the launch MSRP of the RTX 4070 SUPER?

A: Launch MSRP was 599 USD. No launch MSRP is recorded for the RTX 3050 Mobile.

Q: What is the raw compute difference?

A: FP32 output is 35.48 TFLOPS on the 4070 SUPER versus 5.501 TFLOPS on the 3050 Mobile, roughly a six-and-a-half-fold advantage before factoring in architectural gains.

Architecture Differences

The two cards come from adjacent but distinct NVIDIA eras. The RTX 4070 SUPER is Ada Lovelace, fabricated by TSMC on a 5 nm process, packing 35,800 million transistors onto a 294 mm² die for a density of 121.8M per mm². The RTX 3050 Mobile is Ampere, fabricated by Samsung on an 8 nm process, with 8,700 million transistors on a 200 mm² die at 43.5M per mm². That is nearly three times the transistor density on the newer node, and it shows up everywhere in the resource counts.

The 4070 SUPER carries 7168 shading units, 224 TMUs, 80 ROPs, 56 RT cores, and 224 tensor cores. The 3050 Mobile has 2048 shading units, 64 TMUs, 32 ROPs, 16 RT cores, and 64 tensor cores. Every ratio lands between three and four times in the desktop card's favor, which is consistent with the benchmark margins once clocks are considered: the 4070 SUPER boosts to 2475 MHz from a 1980 MHz base, while the 3050 Mobile tops out at 1343 MHz from 1065 MHz.

Feature support is identical where the database records it. Both report DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2), OpenGL 4.6, and Vulkan 1.4, so neither card is excluded from modern API paths. The difference is purely in execution resources and clocks, not feature-level support.

Specification Differences

The meaningful spec deltas, all from the recorded data:

• Chip: AD104 vs GA107
• Process: TSMC 5 nm vs Samsung 8 nm
• Memory: 12 GB GDDR6X, 192-bit, 504.2 GB/s vs 4 GB GDDR6, 128-bit, 192.0 GB/s
• Memory clock: 21 Gbps effective vs 12 Gbps effective
• FP32: 35.48 TFLOPS vs 5.501 TFLOPS
• Pixel rate: 198.0 GPixel/s vs 42.98 GPixel/s
• Texture rate: 554.4 GTexel/s vs 85.95 GTexel/s
• TDP: 220 W vs 45 W
• Bus: PCIe 4.0 x16 vs PCIe 4.0 x8
• Form factor: dual-slot desktop card, 267 mm long, 112 mm tall, 42 mm wide, versus an integrated mobile part with no standalone dimensions
• Power: 1x 16-pin connector plus a suggested 550 W PSU vs no connectors at all
• Outputs: 1x HDMI 2.1 and 3x DisplayPort 1.4a vs portable-device-dependent
• Release: January 2024 vs May 2021, with the 4070 SUPER slotting between the GeForce 30 and GeForce 50 generations and the 3050 Mobile following the GeForce 20 Mobile line

The PCIe link difference deserves a note: the laptop part runs half the lanes, which can matter when a workload moves large amounts of data across the bus, particularly with only 4 GB of local memory to work in.

Head-to-Head Benchmarks

Three shared tests exist in the database, and all three went to the RTX 4070 SUPER.

3DMark Steel Nomad (DX12): 4627 versus 421, a 999 percent margin. This is the headline number of the comparison. Steel Nomad is a demanding ray-tracing-heavy DirectX 12 workload, and an order-of-magnitude gap here indicates the 3050 Mobile is simply not in the same performance class for modern game rendering. The laptop part's 16 RT cores against 56, combined with far lower clocks, compound into this result.

Geekbench Vulkan: 205624 versus 49051, a 319.2 percent margin. Vulkan compute runs more than four times faster on the desktop card. Given the tensor core counts, 224 against 64, and the 35.48 versus 5.501 TFLOPS FP32 figures, the measured gap is consistent with the hardware ratios rather than being an artifact of one test.

Geekbench OpenCL: 172795 versus 50038, a 245.3 percent margin. This is the closest of the three, and even here the 4070 SUPER delivers roughly three and a half times the score. OpenCL being the narrowest result suggests the 3050 Mobile's Ampere design holds up proportionally a bit better in general compute than in game rendering, but it never comes close.

The 4070 SUPER's solo results reinforce the picture: a Passmark G3D score of 29995 and a Passmark GPU Compute score of 17108, alongside Passmark DirectX 9, 10, 11, and 12 results of 344, 167, 273, and 110 respectively, plus a Passmark G2D score of 1184. No equivalent Passmark runs are recorded for the laptop card, so cross-comparison there is not possible.

Where Each One Wins

RTX 4070 SUPER wins: every measured contest. Gaming at high settings and resolutions, DirectX 12 rendering, ray-traced workloads, Vulkan and OpenCL compute, any task that benefits from 12 GB of GDDR6X and 504.2 GB/s of bandwidth. Its rival set also places it in strong company: within 1 percent of the RTX 4090 Mobile's average score and effectively even with the RTX 5050 Mobile, Quadro M6000, and Quadro M6000 24 GB, all far above what the 3050 Mobile's rivals suggest. For a desktop build with a 550 W or better PSU and a free dual-slot, 267 mm of space, it is the clear pick of the two.

RTX 3050 Mobile wins: nothing on the scoreboard, but everything the scoreboard ignores. It draws 45 W, needs no power connectors, and lives inside portable devices with outputs determined by the host system. Averaged across its recorded tests its score of 33170 is not far from the 4070 SUPER's 43223 in the database's aggregate metric, yet the shared benchmarks reveal how misleading that narrow average gap is: the aggregate blends different test suites, while direct comparison shows the desktop card three to eleven times faster. The 3050 Mobile is a laptop-class part for modest workloads on the go; the 4070 SUPER is a performance-class desktop GPU. The database contains no scenario in which the mobile part outperforms it.