Nvidia is currently a force to be reckoned with when it comes to consumer graphics, with powerful cards such as the GeForce GTX Titan sitting right at the top of benchmarking tables. The company is also no slouch when it comes to professional graphics solutions, and it's aiming to cement its position in the market with the Quadro K6000. The new card offers a significant performance bump over its predecessor, the Quadro 6000, providing five times higher compute performance and almost twice the graphics capability of the older card.
Unlike Nvidia's GeForce line and AMD's Radeon HD series cards, professional graphics GPUs aren't built with gaming performance in mind. Instead they are designed for use in professional workstations, providing fast and stable performance for applications such as CAD design and animated film production.
Based on Nvidia Kepler architecture, the new professional card features 12 GB GDDR5 graphics memory, 2,880 streaming multiprocessor cores and supports up to four simultaneous displays (DVI-I, DVI-D, DPx2) at up to 4K resolution. It also boasts ultra-low latency video I/O and support for large-scale visualizations.
Dennis Malone, an associate engineer with Nissan North America, commented on the impact of the increased performance of the new card in relation to building 3D vehicle models, stating that “Instead of spending significant time simplifying the models to fit into previous hardware, we can now spend more time reviewing and iterating designs up front which helps avoid costly changes to tooling.”
Klaas Koster, manager of seismic interpretation at the Apache Corporation, gave another testimonial for the K6000, claiming that it tripled the performance of an older Quadro K5000 card when running jobs on Terraspark's InsightEarth application.
There's currently no word on pricing for the device, which will start shipping this fall, but with the older Quadro 6000 card currently hovering around the US$2,100 mark on Amazon.com, its likely that the new card's price tag will match its high level of performance.
Source: Nvidia