Don’t let its small size fool you—the NVIDIA RTX A2000 packs all the latest Ampere tech.
Dell has sponsored this post.

In April of this year, NVIDIA announced a series of new RTX graphics cards based on the company’s latest Ampere microarchitecture. Among these cards was the NVIDIA RTX A2000, the company’s entry-level RTX card for mobile devices. At SIGGRAPH 2021 in August, NVIDIA announced a desktop version of the RTX A2000, set to be released this October.
Why is the RTX A2000 so interesting? Both the mobile and desktop A2000 cards lower the barrier of entry to RTX technology compared to the previous Turing-based lineup. The predecessor to the RTX A2000, the NVIDIA T2000, did not include either of the compute cores that have come to define RTX: RT Cores for real-time ray tracing, and Tensor Cores for AI acceleration. The RTX A2000 has both.
“Our goal is to bring the power of RTX to as many of our customers as we can, and the way to do that is to bring it down the stack to lower price points,” commented Allen Bourgoyne, NVIDIA’s Senior Manager of Product Marketing for Professional Visualization Solutions.
Who is the NVIDIA RTX A2000 For?
As the entry point to RTX technology, the NVIDIA RTX A2000 isn’t for those who demand the highest graphical power available. But for those who could benefit from RTX technology without needing the biggest GPU on the block, the A2000 is an attractive option.
Product designers can use the RTX A2000 for real-time photorealistic rendering, augmented and virtual reality applications, and simulation software such as the real-time ANSYS Discovery. With the mobile RTX A2000, these capabilities can be accessed from lightweight laptops, not just the bulkier top-end mobile workstations. The Dell Precision 5560, for example, is one of Dell’s thin and light products that can now for the first time be configured with RTX graphics.
“People want to have the most powerful, thin and light thing they can carry around,” Bourgoyne stated. “And so we think the RTX A2000 is a great product and really meets what a lot of our customers are asking for.”

For those with desktop workstations that have begun to slip into the sands of obsolescence, the RTX A2000 can provide an easy path to upgrade to the latest graphics technology.
“In the manufacturing and product design workspace, a lot of users are still on previous generation graphics cards, or even unsupported cards that may not be at the professional level,” observed Himanshu Iyer, Senior Product Marketing Manager at NVIDIA. “The A2000 is a good opportunity for those companies who want to be able to do these professional visualization types of workflows at a lower cost, in a smaller form factor.”
It doesn’t end there. Dell’s Greg Brill pointed out that in this age of remote work, every professional can benefit from RTX graphics. He proved it by smoothly adjusting the blur of his video background, creating a clean meeting-ready setting where before there had been a bedroom that would have prompted a song from Mary Poppins. He used a tool called NVIDIA Broadcast, which uses RTX Tensor Cores to optimize video streaming. Besides blurring backgrounds, it can also auto-track a user’s face and filter out background noise on both ends of the stream.
“It really gives it a different level of professionalism, even just based on that entry-level RTX architecture,” Brill said.
NVIDIA Broadcast is just the tip of the iceberg for Tensor Cores, and AI more generally. AI applications of all sorts are undergoing a population explosion—NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang himself used the phrase “big bang of AI” to describe the situation earlier this year. Another recent example is Neural Filters, a new feature of Adobe Photoshop that taps into Tensor Cores to manipulate human faces in a spookily realistic way. Faces can be made happy or angry, aged up or down, and gazes shifted from left to right. Here’s an example featuring Huang:

It’s not exactly perfect, as Huang himself would probably agree (this particular Neural Filter, called Smart Portrait, is still in beta). But give it time. As AI-assisted apps continue their mass proliferation, there will be fewer and fewer users who won’t benefit from AI acceleration via hardware like the RTX Tensor Cores.
“If you really want to buy a system that’s going to last you 12, 24, 36 months, the ability to accelerate AI and these more advanced workflows is going to start to become more and more important,” Brill concluded.
Specs of the NVIDIA RTX A2000 Mobile and Desktop Graphics Cards
Ampere-based GPUs are built on an 8nm process, while the previous Turing GPUs were on a 12nm process. The reduction in size is one of the reasons NVIDIA was able to add RT and Tensor Cores to the RTX A2000 while the T2000 had only CUDA Cores (the main graphical compute elements found in all of NVIDIA’s graphics cards).
“With this generation moving to Ampere technology, we moved to a smaller node,” Bourgoyne explained. “So, a little bit smaller die package, but the die’s still fairly large, so we could get enough of those Cores available at the right size, the right power and price point to bring that down to the next level.”
Here are the specs of both the mobile and desktop NVIDIA RTX A2000 GPUs:

The power available to the mobile RTX A2000 depends on the system that it’s in. The aforementioned Dell Precision 5560, for example, can provide 55W of power to the A2000. The bigger Dell Precision 5760 can run the same chip at 65W. And the even bigger Dell Precision 7560 can run the RTX A2000 at its max power level, 80W. The higher the power, the better the graphics card performs.
“Dell’s done a great job of fitting [the RTX A2000] into a wide range of laptops that meets their customer needs as well,” praised Bourgoyne.
Of course, these laptops can accommodate more powerful Ampere graphics cards should users require them. The Dell Precision 5760 maxes out with the RTX A3000, and both the Precision 7560 and 7760 can be configured up to an RTX A5000, the current king of the mobile RTX lineup. But for those who just need the occasional boost for rendering, VR, simulation or AI, or simply those who want to futureproof their workstation, the RTX A2000 is NVIDIA’s most accessible pro RTX card to date.
For more about the NVIDIA RTX A2000 graphics card, visit NVIDIA.com, and for more about the Dell Precision series of desktop and mobile workstations, visit Dell.com.