NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Mobile vs NVIDIA Quadro M4000M Comparison

NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3070 Mobile and Quadro M4000M sit at the same 65th percentile of all GPUs, but that parity in overall standing masks a generational chasm. The RTX 3070 Mobile is an Ampere-based part built for modern gaming laptops, while the Quadro M4000M is a Maxwell-era professional mobile GPU from 2015. The two share only a handful of comparable benchmark results, and in every shared test, the newer chip dominates by an enormous margin. The data shows a clear hierarchy: the RTX 3070 Mobile is not just faster—it is in a different performance class entirely.

Head-to-Head Benchmarks

The head-to-head comparison is short but decisive, with only two overlapping tests between the two GPUs. In Geekbench OpenCL, the RTX 3070 Mobile scores 92,939 against the Quadro M4000M’s 19,989. That is a 365% delta—the newer GPU delivers nearly 4.7 times the raw compute throughput of the older professional part. The gap is slightly narrower in Geekbench Vulkan, where the RTX 3070 Mobile posts 86,768 versus 20,971 for the Quadro M4000M, a 313.8% advantage. These are not incremental improvements; they represent a complete generational overhaul in compute capability.

What makes these numbers more striking is the context. The RTX 3070 Mobile’s average benchmark score across all tests is 20,534, while the Quadro M4000M averages 20,480—a difference of only 0.3%. That near-identical average is misleading. The RTX 3070 Mobile has ten benchmark entries, including heavy DirectX workloads, while the Quadro M4000M only has two Geekbench results. When the two GPUs actually meet on the same test, the RTX 3070 Mobile wins both times, and it wins by hundreds of percentage points. The Quadro M4000M’s average is buoyed by the absence of taxing DirectX tests in its dataset, not by competitive performance.

The RTX 3070 Mobile also shows strength in absolute terms. Its PassMark G3D score of 15,309 places it well above the median GPU, and its 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 result of 2,380 reflects modern architecture efficiency. The Quadro M4000M has no comparable DirectX scores in the data, so any direct comparison in gaming or D3D workloads is impossible. But the Geekbench results alone are sufficient to establish the hierarchy: the RTX 3070 Mobile is the clear winner in every measured metric, with no single test where the Quadro M4000M pulls ahead.

FAQ

Q: How much faster is the RTX 3070 Mobile than the Quadro M4000M in OpenCL?

A: The RTX 3070 Mobile scores 92,939 in Geekbench OpenCL, while the Quadro M4000M scores 19,989. That is a 365% higher score, meaning the RTX 3070 Mobile delivers roughly 4.7 times the OpenCL compute performance.

Q: Do the two GPUs have similar overall benchmark averages?

A: Yes, the average scores are nearly identical—20,534 for the RTX 3070 Mobile and 20,480 for the Quadro M4000M, a 0.3% difference. However, this average is based on different test sets; the Quadro M4000M lacks DirectX benchmark results, while the RTX 3070 Mobile includes them.

Q: Which GPU wins in Vulkan performance?

A: The RTX 3070 Mobile wins decisively, scoring 86,768 in Geekbench Vulkan versus 20,971 for the Quadro M4000M. The delta is 313.8% in favor of the newer card.

Q: Are both GPUs in the same performance percentile?

A: Yes, both are listed at the 65th percentile of all GPUs. This reflects their overall average scores, which are nearly equal, but it does not account for the fact that the RTX 3070 Mobile faces a much harder benchmark suite.

Q: What is the memory bandwidth difference?

A: The RTX 3070 Mobile has 448.0 GB/s of bandwidth with 8 GB of GDDR6 memory, while the Quadro M4000M offers 160.4 GB/s with 4 GB of GDDR5. The newer card has 2.8 times the bandwidth and double the capacity.

Q: Which GPU has more shading units?

A: The RTX 3070 Mobile has 5,120 shading units, while the Quadro M4000M has 1,280. That is a 4:1 ratio, which explains the massive compute advantage seen in the Geekbench results.

Where Each One Wins

The RTX 3070 Mobile wins every measurable comparison in this dataset, but the nature of its victories matters for real-world use cases. In compute-heavy workloads like OpenCL and Vulkan, the newer GPU is untouchable—the 365% and 313.8% deltas are not close calls. This makes the RTX 3070 Mobile the obvious choice for any task that leverages general-purpose GPU compute, from rendering to machine learning inference.

The Quadro M4000M, despite losing every head-to-head test, still holds a niche. Its 64.83 GPixel/s pixel rate and 81.04 GTexel/s texture rate are respectable for a 2015 professional mobile GPU, and its 100 W TDP is lower than the RTX 3070 Mobile’s 115 W. In legacy professional applications that were optimized for Maxwell architecture and don’t require modern features like ray tracing or tensor cores, the Quadro M4000M could still function adequately. But the data does not support any performance advantage—it wins nothing in the benchmark suite.

The RTX 3070 Mobile also wins on future-proofing. It supports DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2) and Vulkan 1.4, while the Quadro M4000M only reaches DirectX 12 (12_1). The newer GPU includes 40 ray tracing cores and 160 tensor cores; the Quadro M4000M has neither. For any workload that uses these modern features, the RTX 3070 Mobile is not just faster—it is the only viable option of the two.

Specification Differences

The most glaring difference is memory. The RTX 3070 Mobile packs 8 GB of GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus, delivering 448.0 GB/s. The Quadro M4000M has 4 GB of GDDR5 on the same 256-bit bus, but only reaches 160.4 GB/s. That is a 2x capacity and 2.8x bandwidth advantage for the newer card.

Compute resources also diverge sharply. The RTX 3070 Mobile has 5,120 shading units, 160 TMUs, and 80 ROPs. The Quadro M4000M has 1,280 shading units, 80 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. The pixel rate is 124.8 GPixel/s versus 64.83 GPixel/s, and the texture rate is 249.6 GTexel/s versus 81.04 GTexel/s. FP32 throughput is 15.97 TFLOPS for the RTX 3070 Mobile, compared to 2.593 TFLOPS for the Quadro—a 6.2x difference.

Clock speeds tell a similar story. The RTX 3070 Mobile runs at 1110 MHz base and 1560 MHz boost, while the Quadro M4000M runs at 975 MHz base and 1013 MHz boost. Memory clocks are 1750 MHz (14 Gbps effective) versus 1253 MHz (5 Gbps effective). The bus interface also moves from PCIe 3.0 x16 to PCIe 4.0 x16, and the Quadro uses an MXM module form factor while the RTX card is portable-device dependent with no specified slot width.

Architecture Differences

The architectural gap is generational. The RTX 3070 Mobile is built on NVIDIA’s Ampere architecture using the GA104 chip, fabricated on an 8 nm process at Samsung. The Quadro M4000M uses the older Maxwell 2.0 architecture with the GM204 chip, built on a 28 nm process at TSMC. The process node shrink from 28 nm to 8 nm is massive, enabling the RTX 3070 Mobile to pack 17,400 million transistors into a 392 mm² die, for a density of 44.4 million transistors per mm². The Quadro M4000M has 5,200 million transistors on a 398 mm² die, a density of just 13.1 million per mm².

This transistor budget buys the RTX 3070 Mobile features that the Quadro M4000M simply does not have. The newer GPU includes 40 dedicated ray tracing cores and 160 tensor cores, which are entirely absent from the Maxwell part. It also supports FP16 computation at a 1:1 ratio with FP32, while the Quadro M4000M lists no FP16 capability at all. The RTX 3070 Mobile’s API support extends to DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2), whereas the Quadro M4000M is limited to DirectX 12 (12_1). Both support OpenGL 4.6 and Vulkan 1.4, but the underlying hardware is fundamentally different.

Power consumption is surprisingly close—the RTX 3070 Mobile is rated at 115 W TDP, while the Quadro M4000M sits at 100 W. That 15 W difference is negligible given the massive performance gap. The RTX 3070 Mobile achieves its dominance despite only a 15% higher power budget, which speaks to the efficiency gains of the 8 nm process and modern architecture design. The Quadro M4000M’s release date of August 2015 also predates the RTX 3070 Mobile’s January 2021 launch by over five years, putting them in entirely different technology generations.