Nvidia Announces Quadro K6000 Workstation GPU

Nvidia is today using SIGGRAPH 2013 as a launchpad for a new 'top card' in its Quadro line of workstation graphics cards. As the new flagship of Nvidia's professional graphics line, the Quadro K6000 introduces unrivaled power for a workstation GPU as well as 12 GB of memory, the largest amount of GPU memory yet available. Check the specs below:

Pretty impressive specsheet and the 2880 CUDA cores and 12 GB of GPU memory ensure it's not just the 'Quadro version of the Titan.' Nvidia is going to great lengths to present the advantage of the 12 GB of memory on the card in three key markets: animation and visual effects, automotive and product design, and energy exploration.

First, the company gave a prototype card to the boys (and girls) at Pixar. You can see what they had to say about it above. Considering Pixar doesn't normally endorse any kind of products, this is high praise. The particular interest in this card for the entertainment market is that they can use higher levels of detail than they previously could and still maintain interactivity.

Then Nvidia gave one to the design center at Nissan North America. The Pathfinder above is forty million polygons. Normally, when the design center receives a car design from engineering to do visualizations, they get a NURBS-based CAD model which they first convert into polygons and then spend hours (more than likely days) reducing the resolution of in order for the model to be useable. Things like reducing the overall polygon count without losing the fine detail, greatly reducing the complexity of the interior when doing visualizations of the exterior (and vice versa), greatly simplifying the chassis parts, etc. With the Quadro K6000, they were able to take the above model , import it and do elementary cleanup, and then surface it for rendering. This is instead of spending large amounts of time just making the model lightweight enough to manipulate in RTT Deltagen, Nissan's application of choice.

Lastly, one was given to Apache Corporation. Apache uses Terraspark's InsightEarth for oil and gas exploration. This work involves huge datasets - hundreds of gigabytes - and they are using GPUs to process the data. The larger GPU memory size means they can load much larger segments of their dataset onto the GPU, thiu greatly speeding up their work.

Nvidia expects the Quadro K6000 to be available this fall throughout its normal professional graphics distribution channels. Expected price is unavailable at this time, but Nvidia expects top announce its price as it gets closer to its ship date.