NVIDIA Quadro 6000
A few weeks ago, we were one of the first publications to publish a review of NVIDIA’s new flagship workstation GPU the Quadro 6000. We said it was powerful then—after all, we awarded it our highest honor, the Icrontic Golden Fedora—but it turns out we also weren’t showing you its full potential.
Let’s be frank, we made a mistake in our initial review and the numbers we presented weren’t accurate for the Quadro 6000 running at its full capacity; vertical synchronization (vsync) was running and the card was effectively handicapped. We knew vsync was important in determining our benchmarking numbers and we ran all the benchmarks twice, once with vsync on and once with it off. Unfortunately, we uploaded the wrong set of benchmarks and in editing, the second set got overlooked. We’re revisiting the review because we want to apologize to both NVIDIA and our readers for not getting this right and we want you to have the correct results.
Vsync is often an important factor in the user experience and it’s something most users will want to have enabled when they’re working in 3D applications. Basically, it constrains the graphics card to rendering at a framerate equivalent to the refresh rate of the display you’re using. Let’s say your display is running at a refresh rate of 60Hz; if your graphics card is rendering 3D graphics at 90 frames per second, the monitor can’t display any more than 60 FPS. This can produce perceptible artifacts in the 3D view when the graphics card gets ahead and the monitor ends up displaying part of one image the GPU is sending and part of the following image the GPU has already moved onto. With vsync off, you may see tearing when the images are changing quickly—turning vsync on will keep the graphics card from running too fast and prevents these artifacts.
While this can be good for the user experience, it’s bad for benchmarking because the graphics card isn’t giving you accurate framerates that reflect how powerful a card is—especially when you’re comparing it to competing products running with vsync off.
Without further ado, here’s how the Quadro 6000 really stacks up:
When we posted the Viewperf benchmarks with vsync on, the Quadro 6000 has an impressive lead on almost every test we ran. Now, with the settings corrected and the Quadro unleashed, the difference is staggering. In terms of raw horsepower the Quadro 6000 is unmatched—regardless of whether you’re running with vsync on or off, the Quadro 6000’s performance is unparalleled. It’s certainly hard not to be impressed.
The recommendation of the Golden Fedora, our highest award, was given with crippled results, and it still stands. What does that tell you about the Quadro 6000? It’s an absolute monster, and without question the highest performing single-card workstation GPU in the world right now.
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