Nvidia Corp. this week formally introduced its new-generation Quadro K5000 high-end graphics card for professional applications that will become available later this year. The board is based on professional flavour of the GK104 chip and supports a number of professional-grade capabilities. The Quadro K5000 will also be a key component of Nvidia's second-generation Maximus platform that combines Tesla compute cards with Quadro graphics solutions.

The Nvidia Quadro K5000 powered by GK104 GL features 1536 stream processors, 128 texture units, 32 raster operating units as well as 256-bit memory bus. The novelty fully supports modern high-end features like DirectX 11.1, OpenGL 4.3, OpenCL 1.2, stereoscopic-3D, 4 multi-monitor capability, PhysX, professional multi-GPU technology, PCI Express 3.0 and so on. In addition, the Quadro K5000 supports Quadro Sync, Quadro Mosaic, Quadro digital video pipeline, Nvidia GPUDirect and so on.

The exact clock-speed of the K5000 chip is unknown, but unlike graphics cards for gamers, the Quadro one is equipped with 4GB of GDDR5 memory operating at 5.4GHz. Given the fact that peak single-precision compute performance of the Quadro K5000 is 2.1TFLOPS as opposed to 3.1TFLOPS of the GeForce GTX 680, Nvidia did reduce clock-speed of the professional board by around 33%, or to about 600MHz.

Among the exclusive features the Quadro K5000 has to offer are bindless textures that give users the ability to reference over 1 million textures directly in memory to reduce CPU overhead; FXAA/TXAA film-style anti-aliasing technologies for outstanding image quality; •Display Port 1.2 support for resolutions up to 3840*2160@60Hz.

Along with the new professional graphics card, Nvidia unveiled its second-generation Maximus technology, which now supports GPUs based on Kepler architecture. With this second generation of Maximus, compute work is assigned to run on the new Nvidia Tesla K20 computing accelerator, freeing up the new Nvidia Quadro K5000 GPU to handle graphics functions. Maximus unified technology transparently and automatically assigns visualization and simulation or rendering work to the right processor.

Leading software vendors certify and support Nvidia Maximus-powered workstations, including Adobe, ANSYS, Autodesk, Bunkspeed, Dassault Systèmes, MathWorks and Paradigm. The world's leading workstation OEMs -- including HP, Dell, Lenovo, and Fujitsu, plus systems integrators such as BOXX Technologies and Supermicro -- will offer second generation Nvidia Maximus-powered workstations.

Second generation Nvidia Maximus-powered desktop workstations featuring the new Nvidia Quadro K5000 ($2249 MSRP) plus the new Nvidia Tesla K20 GPU ($3199 MSRP) will be available starting in December 2012. The Nvidia Quadro K5000 will be available as a separate discrete desktop GPU starting in October 2012.

Tags: Nvidia, Kepler, Geforce, Tesla, Quadro, 28nm, GK104