Nvidia recently unveiled a new and intimidatingly powerful GPU aimed at designers and scientists who require over-the-top visuals for their work.
Meet the Nvidia Quadro P6000, a beastly GPU that is built on the company's revolutionary Pascal architecture and which delivers ultimate performance thanks to its 3,840 CUDA parallel-processing cores.
The Quadro P6000 packs no less than 24 GB of GDDR5X GPU memory, which in turn can output 12 teraflops of FP 32 performance. To put it in perspective, the previous top-of-the-line graphics unit from Nvidia, the new Titan X, delivers only 11 teraflops.
With great power comes great responsibility and apparently, hefty electricity bills too. As would be fit for such high numbers, the P6000 is very demanding when it comes to power and its top consumption of 250W of power makes no compromises.
To run the power-intensive GPU on your rig, you will need PCI Express 3.0 as well as 16 slots on the PC mainboard.
Looking at the P6000's display output, we find a single DVI-D port, an optional stereo port and four DisplayPort 1.4 ports. It should be noted that the card is not fitted for compact rigs, as it measures 10.5 inches in length and 4.4 inches in height.
Nvidia targets the extremely capable card at compute problem resolution and scientific visualization. Additionally, the card will be well prepared to face the high demands of VR design.
The OEM will showcase both the beastly P6000 and its smaller variant, the P5000, at Siggraph 2016.
Technical specs of the Quadro P5000 show the graphics card has 2,560 CUDA cores and 16 GB of GDDR5X memory. The GPU can output up to 8.9 teraflops of FP 32 performance, and it requires less power than its larger sibling. The P5000 runs on 180W of power but packs the same dimensions and video outputs as its larger variant.
The company did not disclose the price points for the two pieces of hardware, but we can only assume that "pricey" does not even begin to cover it.
Steve May, chief technology officer at Pixar Animation Studios, explains how such a GPU might help his team achieve better results. He says it is not uncommon for 3D artists to work with datasets of 50 GB or more.
"The ability to visualize scenes of this size interactively gives our artists the ability to make creative decisions more quickly," May says.
He concludes by underlining that by embedding Pascal architecture into Pixar's workstations, he expects the benefits in workflow to surge.
