Most PC gamers are familiar with Nvidia’s GeForce line of video cards, which ranges from budget-friendly options like the GeForce GTX 950, all the way up to the $1,000 Titan X. There’s a whole line of professional cards as well, the Quadro line, and the green team just doubled the amount of memory in the top-end Quadro to a hefty 24GB without raising the price.
Based on the same hardware as the company’s existing Quadro M6000 design – meaning a single Maxwell 2 family GM200 graphics processor with 3,072 CUDA cores, a 384-bit memory interface, 250W thermal design profile (TDP) and single-precision floating point performance of up to 7 teraflops – anyone looking for external differences will find themselves struggling. The new Quadro M6000 still includes four DisplayPort outputs alongside a single DVI, no HDMI, and Nvidia’s reference-design centrifugal blower cooling system. A look at the specification, though, shows why it’s new: the memory has been doubled from 12GB to 24GB, the highest ever available on a single-GPU graphics card.
Designed for professional users working with extremely large datasets, Nvidia’s new card is causing a stir in the industry. The company has trotted out a range of talking-heads to tell how a doubling of the graphics RAM is going to change how they work, from Nissan Motor Company using memory-intensive global illumination to track down design flaws in its vehicles to Sony Pictures Imageworks boasting of a ten-fold performance boost when rendering complex scenes.
Interestingly, while the new card doubles the GDDR5 memory from the existing Quadro M6000 design it does not come with a price increase: Nvidia has instead chosen to replace the existing M6000 outright, which will no longer be produced, and launch the M6000 24GB at the same price as its predecessor – bad news for anyone who has already picked up the 12GB model, but good news for those who have not yet taken the plunge.
