In more news from SIGGRAPH - Nvidia today unveiled the Quadro K6000, it describes this GPU immodestly as the "visual computing industry's new flagship" and "the fastest GPU ever built". The Quadro K6000 is based upon the Kepler architecture and delivers nearly five-times the compute performance and "nearly double the graphics capability" of the previous Quadro 6000 GPU. This new GPU was launched alongside a new line of professionl graphics GPUs for mobile workstations.
Game changing
"The NVIDIA Quadro K6000 GPU is the highest performance, most capable GPU ever created for the professional graphics market," said Ed Ellett, senior vice president, Professional Solutions Group at NVIDIA. "It will significantly change the game for animators, digital designers and engineers, enabling them to make the impossible possible."
Key performance features and capabilities of the new Quadro K6000 include the following:
- 12GB ultra-fast GDDR5 graphics memory lets designers and animators model and render characters and scenes at unprecedented scale, complexity and richness
- 2,880 streaming multiprocessor (SMX) cores deliver faster visualization and compute horsepower than previous-generation products
- Supports four simultaneous displays and up to 4k resolution with DisplayPort 1.2
- Ultra-low latency video I/O and support for large-scale visualizations
Several big name companies which employ Nvidia powered workstations have had access to early samples of these new Kepler based GPUs. The first impressions are extremely positive. Guido Quaroni, Pixar vice president of Software R&D, said "The Kepler features are key to our next generation of real-time lighting and geometry handling. We were thrilled to get an early look at the K6000. The added memory and other features allow our artists to see much more of the final scene in a real-time, interactive form, and allow many more artistic iterations."
Other testimonials came from Nissan, particularly happy about the 12GB of memory on the Quadro K6000, and Apache Corporation whose specialised geographic exploration software worked three times as quickly.
Mobile muscle
The Nvidia Quadro K5100M GPU is the new flagship professional graphics solution for workstation notebooks. This offers mobile users the "highest levels of performance and graphics memory available". Nvidia says the flagship will be joined by a new line of workstation graphics mobile solutions including the Quadro K4100M, K3100M, K2100M, K1100M, K610M, and K510M GPUs.
Availability
Dell, HP, Lenovo and other major workstation providers will ship systems including NVIDIA Quadro K6000 GPUs this autumn. At the time of writing there are no notebooks featuring the new Quadro K5100M GPU listed but this GPU and others in the new mobile range are scheduled to show up in laptops in autumn.
