Nvidia Debuts 'Pascal' Quadro P6000 and P5000 for VR and Design

Just days after unveiling the new Nvidia Titan X graphics card for gamers and enthusiasts, Nvidia has taken the wraps off two pro workstation versions of the same hardware, under its Quadro line. The new Nvidia Quadro P6000 uses the same Pascal-based GP102 GPU as the new Titan X, while the Quadro P5000 is more equivalent to the GeForce GTX 1080. Both cards however support additional features making them more suitable for professional graphics and content creation work.

The flagship Quadro P6000 and slightly lower-spec P5000 were launched at the ongoing SIGGRAPH conference in Anaheim, California; the world's foremost annual convention of computer graphics experts. Along with its new hardware, Nvidia also showed off a new 360 Video SDK aimed at helping creators who work with multiple 4K video streams such as those created by multi-camera rigs for 360 video, along with more robust Mental Ray support and updates to the Nvidia Optix ray tracing engine and Iray plugin.

Nvidia says its new Quadros are targeted at game and VR experience creators as well as those in the more traditional fields of scientific visualisation, big data, engineering, architecture, and medical research.

The more powerful Quadro P6000 is a full-featured GP102 chip with 3840 parallel processing cores. Total throughput is rated at 12 Teraflops and maximum power consumption is 250W, all of which is consistent with the specs of the new Titan X. The Quadro P6000 is outfitted with 24GB of GDDR5X RAM, with 9Gbps of bandwidth, and unlike the more consumer-oriented Titan X, this card will support ECC memory. However, according to AnandTech, double-precision FP64 operations are not specifically accelerated and will happen at 1/32 speed.

The Quadro P5000 is based on the same GP104 GPU as the GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070, with 2560 processing cores and 16GB of GDDR5X RAM at the same 9Gbps speed. TDP for this card is 180W. Clock speeds have not been announced for either card yet yet, and neither have performance targets or comparisons with the previous Maxwell generation M6000 and M5000.

Each card can drive four monitors at 5K resolution and 60Hz or four 4K monitors at 120Hz. Pascal's signature simultaneous multi projection (SMP) and async compute balancing features are also supported. Pricing was not disclosed at the event, but the two cards should be available in October.

The launches come hot on the heels of Nvidia's rapid Pascal deployment, which started with the high-performance P100 accelerator for big data. The consumer-focused GeForce GTX 1080, 1070 and 1060 cards followed in rapid succession, and the new Titan X was unveiled only a few days ago. This is the quickest succession of new launches in Nvidia's recent history, indicating that GPU production is in full swing with high yields.