Nvidia Quadro 5000 review
Posted by Alex Herrera on October 13th 2010 | Discuss
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Hardware Review
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Benchmarking the Quadro FX 5000 with (for the first time) Viewperf 11
The Quadro 5000 is based on Fermi, Nvidia’s ambitious new architecture covered in detail in the pages of JPR’s Tech Watch and Workstation Report. But the 5000 doesn’t include the maximum number of processing cores the architecture touts. Where Fermi (for now) maxes out a theoretical 512 cores, the Quadro 6000 exploits the most, tapping 448 (similar to the GeForce GTX 470). Nvidia has likely chosen a reduced number to maximize yield and reliability for workstation applications.
With its 352 processing cores and 2.5 GB memory, the Quadro 5000 isn’t intended to be Nvidia’s top performer for the Fermi generation, leaving that role for the 6000. And that begs the question: why did we benchmark the 5000 and not the big gun, the 6000? Well, because at initial launch, only the 4000 and 5000 are immediately available, and we haven’t received a 6000 yet.
But make no mistake, at a $2,249 MSRP, the Quadro 5000 is supposed to be a performer, taking the place of the previous-generation Quadro FX 4800. And how well does the new Quadro 5000 fill the old 4800’s shoes? Quite well, it appears, based on the results of our Viewperf 11 benchmarking. The new model outperforms the old (roughly, based on a comparison to SPEC-submitted Viewperf 11 results for the FX 4800) for the majority of the viewsets by anywhere from 80% to 200%.
Interestingly, in the minority of viewsets where the 5000 didn’t achieve an 80% (or better) speedup, we actually saw performance flat, or even decline slightly. We’d imagine the decline was an anomaly, attributable to one of either: a still-not-completely-tuned driver not taking advantage of all Fermi can do, viewsets that are throttled by I/O, or the possibility that the graphics hardware is so fast that the system can’t issue OpenGL calls fast enough to make them bottleneck. The results do tend to illustrate Fermi has the potential for big speed gains, provided the rest of the system can keep up. And that makes an appropriate segue to SPECapc.
What do we think?
Nvidia’s Fermi has delivered a solid performance boost for conventional 3D graphics. The company touts 8X the geometry performance of the previous generation, a speedup that manifests itself in Viewperf testing. But especially in the context of competitive offerings from rival ATI, new Quadro products built on Fermi are ultimately going to win business based on more than just graphics performance. With a holistic architecture delivering unique features like ECC and 4X double-precision performance—and for the first time enabling a C++ programming environment for high-performance computing—Quadro can tackle a range of computational tasks well beyond rendering. And it’s precisely that proposition that should prove most appealing to prospective professional buyers: buy a high-performance graphics card and get supercomputer-caliber speedups for the many other challenging compute bottlenecks getting in the way of the day’s productivity.
