Nvidia's top end professional graphics card, the Quadro M6000 was launched a little over a year ago. It packed a fully enabled Maxwell GM200 GPU and brought that power to the pro graphics market. Now Nvidia has refreshed the Quadro M6000 with a 24GB GDDR5 version.
Basically the new Quadro M6000 card brings double the graphics RAM capacity to the model released a year ago. Aside from this memory increase all the other specs of the M6000 appear to be identical to last year's model, it offers:
- Maxwell GM200 GPU (28nm)
- 3072 CUDA cores, 192 texture units, and 96 ROPs
- GPU core clocked at up to 1140MHz
- The doubled up memory of 24GB GDDR5 is still clocked at the same speed, providing 6.6Gbps throughput via a 384-bit bus
- 250W TDP
There are other under-the-hood improvements that arrive with this year's model which may well be from a new firmware – hopefully these benefits will be passed on to owners of the older cards – including new temperature and clock speed management options.
As commented upon by AnandTech, the new card will be eagerly adopted by certain segment of the pro graphics market where more VRAM is highly desirable. You can see Sony Pictures Imageworks quoted (above) as being particularly happy with the Nvidia Quadro M6000 24GB for its complex scene animation works. Meanwhile AMD's highest capacity pro graphics card is the FirePro W9100 with 16GB of graphics RAM.
The new Nvidia Quadro card is a direct replacement for the 12GB model and will be priced at the same round figure, $5000.
