RTX Pro vs. GeForce RTX: This Lenovo laptop shows why the Pro GPU is worth it

Everyone who knows anything about PCs knows this brand: Nvidia GeForce RTX. It’s THE name in GPUs (sorry, AMD Radeon and Intel ARC), with Nvidia dominating the market almost like a monopoly in recent years.

However, many consumers may not know that RTX GeForce GPUs are not the only graphics cards made by Nvidia for the PC market. There is also a second brand from Nvidia, the Nvidia RTX Pro series professional GPUs. These graphics cards, formerly marketed as Nvidia Quadro, form the backbone of most mobile laptops on the market.

Take, for example, the Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 3, a mobile workstation we recently tested. This powerful 16-inch laptop packs an Nvidia RTX Pro 3000 Blackwell, which roughly matches the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. We also tested a ThinkPad T16g Gen 3, a Lenovo laptop based on the same design as the ThinkPad P16, but which uses Nvida GeForce GPUs instead – we reviewed it with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080.

Although the RTX 5080 is considered a faster GPU overall, the RTX Pro showed its qualities in the workstation-specific test, the SPECviewperf 2020 suite. This is a test of different CAD benchmarks.

Overall, the ThinkPad P16 outperformed the ThinkPad T16g by around 67% – a striking difference that shows that for some customers, choosing the RTX Pro brand over GeForce may be worth it. The chips may be similar from a technical perspective, but optimizing drivers for CAD can sometimes make all the difference.