One of the big missing markets for NVIDIA with their slow rollout of the Volta architecture was professional workstations. Today, NVIDIA announced they are bringing Volta to the Quadro family with the Quadro GV100 card.
Powered by the same GV100 GPU that announced at last year's GTC in the Tesla V100, and late last year in the Titan V, the Quadro GV100 represents a leap forward in computing power for workstation-level applications. While these users could currently be using TITAN V for similar workloads, as we've seen in the past, Quadro drivers generally provide big performance advantages in these sorts of applications. Although, we'd love to see NVIDIA repeat their move of bringing these optimizations to the TITAN lineup as they did with the TITAN Xp.
As it is a Quadro, we would expect this to be NVIDIA's first Volta-powered product which provides certified, professional driver code paths for applications such as CATIA, Solidedge, and more.
NVIDIA also heavily promoted the idea of using two of these GV100 cards in one system, utilizing NVLink. Considering the lack of NVLink support for the TITAN V, this is also the first time we've seen a Volta card with display outputs supporting NVLink in more standard workstations.
More importantly, this announcement brings NVIDIA's RTX technology to the professional graphics market.
With popular rendering applications like V-Ray already announcing and integrating support for NVIDIA's Optix Raytracing denoiser in their beta branch, it seems only a matter of time before we'll see a broad suite of professional applications supporting RTX technology for real-time. For example, raytraced renders of items being designed in CAD and modeling applications.
This sort of speed represents a potential massive win for professional users, who won't have to waste time waiting for preview renderings to complete to continue iterating on their projects.
The NVIDIA Quadro GV100 is available now directly from NVIDIA now for a price of $8,999, which puts it squarely in the same price range of the previous highest-end Quadro GP100.
