By Mike McCarthy
Nvidia is hosting another online GTC conference this week to coincide with the launch of its professional Ampere GPUs. These are professional variants of the chips that are in the GeForce 30 series cards launched last month. They appear to enable the last few shaders on the GA102 chip, and at 48GB, they have twice the memory of the GeForce 3090.
The RTX A6000 is Nvidia’s new top-tier visualization card (an extension of the former Quadro line), with 10,752 CUDA cores and 48GB of GDDR6 memory with ECC. Like previous Quadro cards, it has four DisplayPort 1.4 outputs. Unlike the GeForce 3090, it fits into the standard double-wide PCIe form factor. It has a standard blower cooling fan with rear exhaust, no extra height and no top-mounted power connectors. It uses a standard 8-pin PCIe power plug and has a 300W TDP. This configuration makes it easier to integrate with existing workstations than the oversized GeForce 3090 and allows it to fit vertically into a 3U chassis.
Like other Ampere-generation cards, it supports PCIe Gen4 for 32GB/s of bandwidth in each direction. Nvidia claims it has 40TFlops of processing power but hasn’t released detailed frequency specifications. The company lists it as having 768GB/s of memory bandwidth and the option of linking two cards over NVLink at 112GB/s. It lists having one NVEnc video encoder and two NVDec decoders, which is interesting, but I have no further details since the information was only in the literature, not the press briefing.
The A40 is a passively cooled card targeted at server installation but with three DisplayPort outputs, unlike Nvidia’s previous Tesla cards in that segment. It is clocked slightly lower than the similar Quadro card but with the same 10,752 CUDA cores and 48GB of GDDR6 ECC memory. It has the same 8-pin power connector, PCIe 4.0 and NVLink specs and slightly lower memory bandwidth at 696GB/s due to lower frequencies. Nvidia also lists one video encoder and two decoders when I would have expected the reverse for a virtual workstation card.
The Quadro cards have always targeted professionals at a steep price over similarly powerful gaming cards, and the A6000 follows that pattern. While 10-bit color output used to be the main differentiating factor that mattered to M&E users, HDR has necessitated that 10-bit and higher color be supported in consumer hardware now, so that feature is no longer limited to pro cards. Quadro cards are still the only option for using adaptors like 3D Vision Pro and Quadro Sync II to lock card outputs together and match them to other hardware. This is key for workflows like video walls and in-camera VFX, where live renders projected behind foreground actors replace greenscreen shots. The output is generated by multiple cards and has to be output in sync (to prevent tearing) and genlocked to the camera for best imaging sensor performance.
But for the average video editor or VFX artist, most of their needs can now be met with a GeForce solution. The Quadro line does offer longer warranties and driver support, hopefully leading to better system reliability in the long haul. The cards are usually clocked more conservatively for better thermal performance and longer peak processing times before throttling takes place. They also usually offer better integration from top-end workstation providers, who have been including Quadro GPUs in their products for many years now.
My recommendation is to make sure you know why you need a Quadro over a GeForce card before you invest that much money in one. But if you do need the features and performance that top-end Quadro cards bring to the table, I wouldn’t consider getting one that wasn’t based on the Ampere architecture. Obviously, there is only one option at the moment with the A6000, but I am confident that Nvidia will fill out the lower tiers in the near future.
Omniverse
The other major announcements for this event are software-based. The first is Nvidia’s Omniverse software package, which allows 3D artists and users to share data between various applications, both on their systems and across the world. Users can be working on different aspects of a 3D project in different programs, and Omniverse allows them to collaborate together far more seamlessly than has been possible up to this point. Omniverse is a framework of software tools and functions, instead of being a single service or application, and covers everything from 3D data types to rendering options. Nvidia is just getting started with it in this initial release, and surely its partners will build on that framework to offer all sorts of other functionality. Nvidia also announced a cloud-based VR service called CloudXR. It runs on AWS and offers low-latency VR and AR viewing without needing a local VR-capable workstation.
Mike McCarthy is an online editor/workflow consultant with over 10 years of experience on feature films and commercials. He has been involved in pioneering new solutions for tapeless workflows, DSLR filmmaking and multi-screen and surround video experiences. Check out his site.
