Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q: FPS benchmarks and laptop guide

The NVIDIA Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q is the efficiency-tuned variant of Turing's mid professional tier — 2304 cores with real-time ray tracing hardware, tuned to 60W for thin workstations. This guide covers its 25 benchmarked games at 1080p (6 with medium-preset data) and the 74 catalog models matched to it.

Where the Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q sits in 2026

A catalog score of 51.9 ranks it 117th of 341 — just above the field's third quartile line. The neighbors bracket it tightly: the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop (52.3), GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q (52) and Apple M5 Pro (51.9) above; the Apple M2 Max (51.6), T1200 Laptop (51.5) and GTX 1070 Max-Q (51.1) below. A 2019 professional card still holding mid-field against 2020s consumer and Apple silicon is a solid aging curve for the Turing generation.

What the chip brings

Turing architecture on the 12nm process: 2304 CUDA cores rated at 5.6 teraflops, 6GB of GDDR6, RT cores and tensor cores with CUDA and DLSS flagged — the first generation that brought ray tracing and AI upscaling to the professional laptop line, inside a 60W Max-Q envelope. Public benchmarks: PassMark 8169, Time Spy 5048, Fire Strike 13617. The 6GB buffer and DLSS support both still matter in 2026: one for viewport data, the other for stretching the chip's remaining years.

FPS in games at 1080p

The high-preset table is convincingly modern: Rocket League at 219 fps, Valorant 140, DOTA 2 126, Counter-Strike 2 110, The Witcher 3 101, Fortnite 100, Rise of the Tomb Raider 99, Shadow of the Tomb Raider 88 (100 on medium), Far Cry 5 87 and X-Plane at 86 (102 on medium), with the capped quartet at its ceilings. The heavyweight block needs settings sense: Forza Horizon 4 at 80, Forza Horizon 5 at 60, Resident Evil 4 remake 45, Cyberpunk 2077 and Metro Exodus at 40 on high. With DLSS in play, that modern block moves up meaningfully.

Laptops that carry it

The 74-model roster is one of the largest professional pools in the catalog, spanning the whole 2024-2026 workstation generation: Dell Pro Precision 7 16 and HP ZBook X G2i at $2200 (2026), ThinkPad P16 Gen 3 at $1760, the ZBook Fury G1i 16/18 pair at $1760, Dell's Pro Max 18/16 Plus at $1440, and the 2024 tier — Precision 5490, ZBook Studio 16 G11, ZBook Power 16 G11, ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 — at $1408. Fleet medians: best-CPU 73.3, best-GPU 66.9, gaming index 82, USComp score 76 — modern platforms whose stronger GPU options lift the pool above this chip's own score.

Bottom line

The RTX 3000 Max-Q is the rare older professional card that still games credibly: a 1080p-high table with DLSS headroom, ray-tracing hardware, and a host roster of current-generation workstations at $1408-2200. For buyers who want one machine for certified work and after-hours gaming, it remains one of the better-balanced entries in this catalog's professional tier. The 6GB buffer is its 2026 ceiling — heavy scenes and newest titles at maximum settings will find it — but as a used-market proposition inside modern chassis, it ages better than most of its era.