NVIDIA Unveils New Quadro Pro Graphics Cards Powered By Potent Pascal GPUs And Beastly GP100

The same awesome architecture that powers NVIDIA's latest generation graphics cards can now be found throughout the maker's entire professional Quadro line for the desktop with top to bottom solutions. We're of course talking about Pascal, the game-changing architecture that made playing titles at a 4K resolution on a single graphics card possible. Pascal now powers half a dozen more Quadro cards that flesh out its existing lineup.

NVIDIA Quadro Cards

Having access to Pascal on the engineering side will provide a boost in performance in several categories. VR, photo-realism, and deep learning technologies, all of which are trending in the professional arena right now, feature bigger data sets and are more complex than ever. NVIDIA says its new Quadro cards based on Pascal will help streamline design and simulation workflows by bringing to the table up to twice the performance of its previous generation Quadro cards based on Maxwell.

"Professional workflows are now infused with artificial intelligence, virtual reality and photo-realism, creating new challenges for our most demanding users," said Bob Pette, vice president of Professional Visualization at NVIDIA. “Our new Quadro lineup provides the graphics and compute performance required to address these challenges. And, by unifying compute and design, the Quadro GP100 transforms the average desktop workstation with the power of a supercomputer."

NVIDA Quadro GP100

The top-end card in NVIDIA's updated Quadro family is the GP100. It has 16GB of second generation high bandwidth memory (HBM2) and provides more than 20 TFLOPS of 16-bit floating point precision computing. Customers can combine two cards with NVLink and scale to 32GB of HBM2 to create a massive visual computing solution on a single platform. NVIDIA also sees this card being used in VR applications and for deep learning tasks in Windows and Linux.

NVIDIA's other desktop Quadro cards powered by Pascal include the P4000, P2000, P1000, P600, and P400. They complete the entire Pascal-based Quadro lineup, including the previously announced P6000 and P5000 for desktop, and mobile GPUs.

Several hardware partners have already committed to supporting the new cards, including Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Fujitsu. NVIDIA has also found a customers out in the field who've been using the new cards prior to their official launch.

"The NVIDIA Quadro P1000 enables me to work at the speed of thought. Orange County Choppers relies on a number of 3D CAD design and visualization tools to build the most innovative custom motorcycles in the world and the P1000 easily handles everything we throw at it. It’s the perfect GPU for an ultra-compact workstation like our BOXX APEXX 1," said Jason Pohl, senior designer for Orange County Choppers.

NVIDIA's newest Quadro cards will be available starting in March. Workstation OEMs will have first dibs, along with authorized distribution partners including PNY in North America and Europe, ELSA/Ryoyo in Japan, and Leadtek in Asia Pacific.