Maxwell Hits The Workstation: NVIDIA Quadro M6000 Graphics Card Review

While workstation graphics cards have a minor focus on gaming, high-end models are capable of delivering great-looking and great performing gameplay. NVIDIA’s Quadro M6000 is powerful enough where its users could rely on it for gaming – it’s a GeForce TITAN X at its core, after all.

So what’s the caveat? A lack of optimizations. While on the GeForce side, NVIDIA constantly rolls out updates that improve general performance in gaming or performance specific to one title, Quadro drivers don’t have such granularity where gaming’s concerned – or, if they do, I haven’t been able to get explicit confirmation of it.

I’d be surprised if multiple-GPUs would even scale in SLI for gaming, but as I’ve never had dual Quadros to test out the theory, I can’t say for certain. A GeForce driver is able to be installed with Quadro hardware, but it’s smart enough to detect that and then install itself as a Quadro driver. It’s a bit strange that this is even possible, but nonetheless, it means there will be no need to use a second OS for the sake of gaming.

As we can see with both 3DMark and Unigine Heaven, the M6000 is a very capable gaming GPU.

The fact that the M6000 performs as an equal to the TITAN X in these tests leads me to believe that the Quadro drivers do include basic optimizations that improve gaming performance as new drivers are released. Quite simply, the fact that the M6000 performs like a TITAN X in these tests means that 4K gaming will be possible, and with good detail settings, too.

If time permits, I’ll conduct special tests to see how this Quadro performs across a handful of games versus a TITAN X gaming card. As I see it now, though, the M6000 will definitely allow you to take a break from work to indulge in some high-performance gaming.