Nvidia claims its new chip is the ‘world’s fastest GPU’ for game and VR design

Nvidia announced today the Quadro P6000 graphics card for workstations, using the “world’s fastest GPU,” or graphics processing unit. The graphics card is targeted at designers who have to create complex simulations for everything from engineering models to virtual reality games.

The Quadro P6000 is based on Nvidia’s new Pascal graphics architecture, and it uses a GPU with 3,840 processing cores. It can reach 12 teraflops of computing performance, or twice as fast as the previous generation.

Nvidia unveiled the new platform for artists, designers, and animators at the Siggraph graphics technology conference in Anaheim, Calif. Nvidia says the new workstation GPU and new improvements in software will enable professionals to work faster and with greater creativity.

Nvidia is also announcing VRWorks’ 360 video software development kit, to enable VR developers to create applications to stitch together 4K video feeds into 360 videos. It is also adding graphics acceleration to the mental ray film-quality renderer, and it is releasing Nvidia Optix 4, the latest version of its GPU ray-tracing engine for creating ultrarealistic imagery. Artists can use it to work with scenes up to 64 gigabytes in detail.

“Often our artists are working with 50GB or higher datasets,” says Steve May, the chief technology officer at Pixar. “The ability to visualize scenes of this size interactively gives our artists the ability to make creative decisions more quickly. We’re looking forward to testing the limits of Pascal and expect the benefits to our workflows to be huge.”

The Quadro graphics cards will be available soon from major computer makers and system integrators.