Maxwell Hits The Workstation: NVIDIA Quadro M6000 Graphics Card Review

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by Rob Williams on July 28, 2015 in Graphics & Displays

What NVIDIA’s GeForce TITAN X does for gaming, its Quadro M6000 does for workstations. As the company’s first Maxwell-based Quadro, the M6000 has a lot going for it: an impressive performance-per-watt rating, support for 4x 4K/60 displays, and despite its 7 TFLOPs performance, requires just a single 8-pin connector.

Page 3 – Encoding & CAD: Adobe Premiere Pro CC & Autodesk AutoCAD 2015

Adobe Premiere Pro CC (2015)

To test the accelerated encoding perks of different GPUs, we make use of the de facto video editing tool Adobe Premiere Pro. In the past, we would have included After Effects results, thanks to its ability to tap into CUDA for accelerated rendering of ray traced elements, but recent versions of that app have failed to update support for Maxwell. Instead, Adobe is preferring to target the renderer bundled with PP, Cinema 4D “lite”.

The three projects are: encoding a 4K RED-shot video to 1080i (w/ MRQ), encoding a music video project to 1080p (w/ MRQ), and the resulting H.264 encode time with PPBM9.

Adobe Premiere Pro 2015
NVIDIA Quadro M6000 - Adobe Premiere Pro CC (2015)

It’s clear that not all video projects are going to see great benefit from a faster GPU; our music video project hit a ceiling, for example, but is notably slower on the K5000. PPBM saw continual improvements, and there were considerable gains with the 4K > 1080p RED encode.

Autodesk AutoCAD 2015

For CAD testing, we’re taking advantage of the excellent Cadalyst benchmark. As a 2016 version of the benchmark isn’t yet available, we’re sticking with the 2015 version.

Autodesk AutoCAD 2015
NVIDIA Quadro M6000 - Cadalyst 2015

Yet again, both the M6000 and TITAN X are on equal footing, and both of those have great improvements in the 3D test – about 20% above the K5200.

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Rob Williams

Rob founded Techgage in 2005 to be an 'Advocate of the consumer', focusing on fair reviews and keeping people apprised of news in the tech world. Catering to both enthusiasts and businesses alike; from desktop gaming to professional workstations, and all the supporting software.

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