Maxwell Quadro For All: NVIDIA Quadro M2000 Workstation Graphics Card Review

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.

To see good gains in performance where video encoding is concerned, specific projects are needed: namely, those with lots of filters or rendering effects. Or, you might just need high-resolution (4K) sources. All three of the tests here scale as we’d expect with faster hardware. AMD’s W4300 impressed in our LuxMark test, but here, it falls well behind NVIDIA’s M2000.

Autodesk AutoCAD 2015

For CAD testing, we’re taking advantage of the excellent Cadalyst benchmark.

For 2D CAD work, this performance chart proves that all modern workstation GPUs are going to provide the same kind of performance. When we move it to 3D projects and the overall “Total Index”, though, it’s easy to spot the differences. CAD is an area where bleeding-edge performance isn’t always needed, and depending on your particular situation, you may not even see a performance improvement even with a faster graphics card. All in all, the M2000 doesn’t fall too far behind much more expensive models.