NVIDIA Brings Professional VR To Notebooks With Quadro M5500

If you’ve been paying any attention to the Internet lately, you’re likely well aware that both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are now “available”, allowing those who preordered either device to tear it up in digital worlds like never before.

While gaming is undoubtedly the biggest scenario revolving around VR, there are many other possibilities for the technology, such as watching movies and using your entire PC in a virtual environment. Today, NVIDIA clues us in to another purpose: business.

In his blog post, NVIDIA’s David Weinstein says that virtual reality “isn’t just at the heart of a new era of entertainment. It’s also for serious business.” Coinciding with that sentiment is the company’s “VR Ready” program, which it launched to help businesses pick out the best VR solution for professional use. At the moment, recommended professional GPUs include the Quadro M5000, M6000, and the brand-new M5500 for notebooks.

The Quadro M5500 is the highest-end professional mobile GPU NVIDIA has ever released, with it sporting 2048 CUDA cores and a TDP of ~150W. At 4.67 TFLOPs single-precision, the M5500 almost matches a GeForce GTX 980 desktop GPU, a card that can handle VR content with ease. With 8GB of GDDR5 RAM as well, the M5500 will have a fair amount of memory to keep its assets in order.

Since VR isn’t likely something many people expected to see (so soon) out of the Quadro series, NVIDIA helps us out to explain who GeForce and Quadro VR solutions are geared for. On the GeForce side, it’s all about the consumer experiences, whether it’s with gaming, sports, movies, concerts, or even things like travel and retail. Quadro, meanwhile (and as always), is designed for content creation and for use in advanced fields such as medical, energy, and manufacturing.

Last year, Volvo teamed up with Microsoft to let some customers use a HoloLens kit to better understand the ins and outs of a car they’re looking to purchase. NVIDIA announced something similar, except it’s with Audi and involves VR, not AR.

Another use case involves the medical field: with VR, surgeons have a new way to operate – and I’m willing to bet their solution will be a little more realistic than Surgeon Simulator.

Because VR requires a lot of horsepower to deliver a “great” experience, NVIDIA doesn’t tout the mobile Quadro M5500 as a definitive solution outside of notebooks. Instead, you’ll have to use a desktop for that, with the bare minimum recommended card being the M5000, as mentioned above. Going higher up the chain, VR will get better with the M6000, while seriously intense workloads could benefit from the M6000 24GB. If that doesn’t prove sufficient enough, how about moving on up to dual M6000s? Sounds tasty, doesn’t it?

Well, let’s ignore the desktop SKUs for a moment, because it’s the ultra-powerful mobile M5500 that deserves a lot of the attention here. The first vendor to put this chip into action is MSI, with its WT72 Pro notebook, the beauty you can see below:

Full specs are not available at this time, but considering the fact that the WT72 has a desktop-class GPU in it, you can probably guess that its other components are going to likewise be very powerful.

The Quadro M5500 is sure to be found on the show floor at the ongoing GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, so if we’re able to get some hands-on testing done with it, we’ll relay our experiences as soon as possible.

As for other VR Ready systems, NVIDIA has worked with both Lenovo and HP to craft some suitable rigs, sporting either the Quadro M5000 or M6000. The ultimate takeaway is this: if you buy a VR Ready system, you are going to have a great VR experience whether you are creating or playing. Assuming you have an HTC Vive or Oculus Rift, of course.

For what it’s worth, NVIDIA recommends the Vive for use with VR Ready machines, although the Rift will get the job done, too. But… let’s face it, when a system is going to cost $5,000+, paying $200 extra for the Vive seems like a smart idea.