Can I play on a professional graphics card?

Among the questions that our specialists have to answer is the following: will the games run on a professional card or is it comfortable to play on graphics devices that are not designed for this purpose?

Here is the answer.

Technically, it is quite possible. There is not much difference between gaming and professional cards when it comes to NVIDIA and AMD products. We will give an example with test charts to show whether it is reasonable to do so.

Comparing a professional and a gaming video card

Let's take the NVIDIA RTX A4000 graphics card and look at the specifications of the GeForce RTX 3070Ti. Does it fit? In general, yes. The only significant difference is the lower GPU and memory frequencies. Will the lower frequency be compensated for by twice the amount of memory (16 GB versus 8)?

Here are the test results - the first graph has a resolution of 1440, the second one has a resolution of 4K.

The bottom line is that the NVIDIA RTX A4000 cannot compete with the top-end gaming card. Even overclocking didn't help. Lower frequencies, compared to the competition, play the most important role. A larger memory capacity does not play a role. As a result, the NVIDIA RTX A4000 professional graphics card can compete with the GeForce RTX 3060Ti, which is inferior to the RTX 3070Ti. Nevertheless, the A4000 easily delivers 50-60 fps in 4K resolution, which is a good result.

Let's look at the other side of the comparison between the NVIDIA RTX A4000 and the GeForce RTX 3070Ti. The gaming card is much more power-hungry in terms of electricity - by as much as 150W. Some cards, such as the Radeon RX 6600 XT and others, are much less productive with high power consumption. You can see the test results in the image.

Conclusion: buying an NVIDIA RTX A4000 and using it instead of a gaming card is not advisable. Firstly, you lose in performance (although you gain in energy savings), and secondly, for the money that A4000 costs, you can buy a more powerful gaming card. But if you have the opportunity to do so without additional costs, you can play even heavy modern games on a professional graphics card without any difficulty and with good fps.