NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 Brings Affordable Ray Tracing Horsepower To Workstation Pros
NVIDIA is fleshing out its Quadro RTX series of professional graphics cards with the Quadro RTX 4000, now the least expensive option in the refreshed Quadro family with dedicated hardware to accelerate ray tracing workloads. As with the higher-end models, the new Quadro RTX 4000 is based on the company's latest generation Turing GPU architecture.
The Quadro RTX 4000 release joins a growing product stack that already includes the Quadro RTX 8000, 6000, and 5000. Priced at $900 (estimated street price), it is the only one of the bunch to carry a sub-$1,000 price tag—the other three cards range in price from $2,300 to $10,000. At less than half the cost of the Quadro RTX 5000, the new 4000 model is more accessible to professionals with smaller budgets.
So, what does a $900 Quadro RTX graphics card bring to the table? Here's a breakdown of the core specs, compared to the other cards:
- Quadro RTX 8000: 4,608 CUDA Cores, 72 RT Cores, 576 Tensor Cores, 48GB GDDR6 Memory, $10,000
- Quadro RTX 6000: 4,608 CUDA Cores, 72 RT Cores, 576 Tensor Cores, 24GB GDDR6 Memory, $6,300
- Quadro RTX 5000: 3,072 CUDA Cores, 48 RT Cores, 384 Tensor Cores, 16GB GDDR6 Memory, $2,300
- Quadro RTX 4000: 2,304 CUDA Cores, 36 RT Cores, 288 Tensor Cores, 8GB GDDR6 Memory, $900
The Quadro RTX 4000 is a single-slot solution, so it should fit inside a variety of workstation enclosures. It's not as powerful as the higher-end models, but importantly it still wields RT Cores and Tensor Cores, the latter of which can deliver 57 TFLOPS of deep learning performance.
"Professionals from the manufacturing, architecture, engineering and media creation industries witnessed a seismic shift in computer graphics with the launch of Turing in August. The field’s greatest leap since the invention of the CUDA GPU in 2006, Turing features new RT Cores to accelerate ray tracing and next-gen Tensor Cores for AI inferencing which, together for the first time, make real-time ray tracing possible," NVIDIA says.
As with the higher-end models, the Quadro RTX 4000 offers support for both USB-C and VirtualLink for next-generation virtual reality and mixed reality headsets. VirtualLink is a new open standard aimed at replacing the plethora of cables that today's more potent VR headsets require, and it has the backing of industry heavyweights such as AMD, Microsoft, Oculus, and Valve, and of course NVIDIA.
