by Rob Williams on May 5, 2016 in Graphics & Displays
To those who’ve been waiting for a mid-range Maxwell Quadro to come along: your wait is over. To help wrap up its Maxwell-based lineup, NVIDIA’s Quadro team has released the ~$500 M2000. This card is largely targeted at CAD users and those with lighter 3D design needs, and promises to be much more efficient – and faster overall – than its predecessor. We gave the card a thorough test to see just how true that is.
NVIDIA’s primary focus for its Quadro line is content creation, although given that the cards are similar enough to those in the GeForce line, great gaming experiences can be expected if the card in question offers good general performance. In the M2000’s case, 1080p gameplay at modest detail levels can be expected.
So what’s the caveat with gaming on workstation cards? 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.
To get a quick gauge on the performance of our workstation GPU collection in gaming, we use Futuremark’s 3DMark and Unigine’s Heaven.
For most gaming, the M2000 should perform similarly to the K5000, although Unigine proves that if detail levels are cranked, the men begin to get separated from the boys. In both sets of tests, NVIDIA’s M2000 proves to be a far better gaming option than the FirePro W4300.