Nvidia positions Blackwell as the first mass-market architecture built for AI. That is partially marketing. It is also partially true. Between RTX 4060 Ti (Ada Lovelace) and RTX 5080 (Blackwell) on our dedicated hosting, the differences are concrete. Here is what matters.
Topics
- FP8 tensor cores
- GDDR7 memory
- DP4A successors and INT4 paths
- What it buys you in tokens/sec
- When Ada is still fine
FP8 Tensor Cores
Ada tensor cores did FP16 and FP32 well but did not natively accelerate FP8. Blackwell adds first-class FP8 support. This matters because FP8 models are roughly half the size of FP16 while keeping most of the quality. On a Blackwell card you can load a 7B FP8 model where an 8 GB Ada card would have to drop to INT4. The token speed advantage is real because FP8 is the native format, not a conversion.
GDDR7
Every consumer Blackwell card uses GDDR7. The practical effect: bandwidth per GB of VRAM jumps by 50-70% over the GDDR6 that Ada used. The 5080 hits ~960 GB/s where the 4070 capped around ~504 GB/s. For memory-bound LLM decode, this is the bigger real-world upgrade than FP8 in most workloads.
DP4A Successors
Blackwell extends Nvidia’s integer acceleration paths. INT4 operations run faster on native hardware, which benefits GGUF/GPTQ/AWQ quantised models. On Ada, INT4 inference often converts internally to INT8 or uses slower paths. Blackwell’s DP4A improvements and related tensor instructions run INT4 closer to its theoretical speed. See our quantisation comparison for how this plays out.
What It Adds Up To
For a typical 7B LLM at INT8, a Blackwell 5080 delivers roughly 70-85% more tokens/sec than an Ada 4060 Ti despite similar VRAM. The bulk of that gain is bandwidth. For a 7B FP8 model the delta is wider – nearly double – because Ada cannot use FP8 natively. For SDXL image generation the gap is smaller (~30-40%) because image pipelines are more compute-bound.
| Workload | Ada (4060 Ti) | Blackwell (5080) |
|---|---|---|
| Mistral 7B INT8 decode | ~45 t/s | ~85 t/s |
| Mistral 7B FP8 decode | Unsupported natively | ~110 t/s |
| SDXL 1024 30 steps | ~3.5 s | ~2.3 s |
Blackwell Hosting, UK-Based
5060, 5080, and 5090 available on dedicated servers with fixed monthly pricing.
Browse GPU ServersWhen Ada Is Still Fine
Ada is not obsolete. The 4060 Ti 16GB at the right monthly price still delivers more VRAM than the 5080. The 4060 is still the value winner at the 8 GB tier when raw decode speed is not critical. If your workload is running steadily on Ada today and your pain is not tokens/sec, you do not need to upgrade. If FP8 checkpoints appear on your roadmap, the next server you spec should be Blackwell.
See the head-to-heads: 4060 vs 5060 and 4060 Ti vs 5060.
