In a rather unexpected move, Nvidia introduced its new flagship graphics card for the professional visualization market and its new GeForce RTX 40-series graphics boards for gamers. The new Nvidia RTX 6000 48GB carries almost the name of its predecessor, yet this is an all-new Proviz solution based on the Ada Lovelace architecture.
Nvidia says that its RTX 6000 graphics card with 48GB of GDDR6 ECC memory onboard will offer up to 2X – 4X the performance of the previous-generation RTX A6000 due to the massively increased number of CUDA and RT cores as well as the brand-new Ada Lovelace architecture.
Nvidia's new flagship RTX 6000 48GB graphics card leverages the company's AD102 graphics processing unit, yet the company does not disclose its exact configuration for now. Typically, the company tends to lower the power consumption of its workstation-grade graphics cards compared to top-of-the-range gaming offerings in a bid to prolong their lifespan, which is why the RTX 6000 48GB has a TDP rating of up to 300W power (vs. 450W in case of the GeForce RTX 4090). Therefore, do not expect the RTX 6000 48GB to feature the same HPU configuration as the GeForce RTX 4090 or rumored GeForce RTX 4090 Ti.
"The RTX 6000 GPU's larger L2 cache, a significant increase in number and performance of next-gen cores, and increased memory bandwidth will result in impressive performance gains for the broad Ansys application portfolio," said Dipankar Choudhury, Ansys Fellow and HPC Center of Excellence lead.
Due to the reduced power consumption of the RTX 6000 48GB, the card comes equipped with a relatively compact dual-slot cooling system (4.4-inches x 10.5 inches) with a blower fan designed to ensure that the new board fits into workstations as well as servers (since the product can also work for remote rendering and virtual desktop applications). As for display outputs, the adapter has four DisplayPort 1.4 connectors to drive four monitors with up to 5Kp60 or 8Kp30 resolution or two monitors with up to 8Kp60 resolutions.
Nvidia said its new flagship graphics board for workstations would be available this December. Unfortunately, the company did not reveal the price of its new RTX 6000 48GB card. But based on the fact that Nvidia sells its previous-generation RTX A6000 48GB graphics card for an MSRP of $6,999, we can make some guesses about the company's recommended price for the new one that implies higher performance.
