Nvidia has lifted the curtains on a new family of cutting-edge Quadro graphics cards at GTC 2015; including the super high-end Quadro M6000. This 12GB $5000 monster almost makes the Titan X look like an integrated graphics card. The specs are legit bananas.
Nvidia’s new Quadro range is aimed squarely at professional designers and video editors working at the enterprise level. The flagship is the fastest and most capable professional GPU on the market, providing twice the performance of the previous generation’s top-of-the-range Quadro Kepler.
The top dog is based on Maxwell GPU architecture and boasts 12GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 6.6GHz with a 317GB/s bandwidth. The board packs in 3072 CUDA cores, 192 texture mapping units, 96 raster operations pipelines and a 384-bit memory bus for an estimated seven teraFLOPS of compute performance. Blimey.
LucasFilm recently swapped over to Quadro M6000s for post-production work on Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. The studio saw gains of 55 per cent in their ray-tracing application compared to the previous architecture.
Nvidia has yet to announce pricing for the Quadro M6000, but you can expect it to sit somewhere between $US4000 and $US5000. (This makes the Titan X’s $999 price tag slightly more palatable.)
See also: Nvidia GTC Keynote Live Blog: Follow All The News As It Happened
In addition to the new Quadro range, Nvidia also unveiled a Visual Computing Appliance (VCA) workstation that packs in no fewer than eight Quadro M6000 cards. Naturally, it’s designed for insanely intensive rendering tasks such as photorealistic digital 3D models that can be interacted with in real time.
With a total system memory of 256GB, 2TB of SDD storage and 20 physical cores, the Quadro VCA is being billed as the fastest platform for GPU rendering on a single node. It will cost a cool $50,000. Bargain.
Gizmodo travelled to GTC 2015 in San Jose, California as a guest of Nvidia.