NVIDIA gave me a chance to review the Quadro K5000 graphics board back in 2011 and now here, a short three years later, they've come up with the Quadro K5200 board. Initially, this seemed like a short little jump from the previous board with only a simple 2 tacked on, but after taking this board for a spin, I'm even happier than before.
First, a little follow up on the previous board. I've been using the Quadro K5000 board in my machine since writing the review and it works so well that I don't notice it is even there, except when I render a seriously complex scene. When it cranks up to full steam, I can hear its fan kick on and start spinning. Needless to say, it kicks on quite a lot. The Quadro board has literally saved me hundreds of hours or render time that I've taken for granted.
A good example of this is a realistic Earth rendering project that I recently worked on. The scene used high-res maps of the Earth surface along with two layers of cloud data. The textures for the scene were almost 3GB in size. When I rendered this complex scene it took some time to load all the textures into memory, but once loaded, I could render the Earth from any viewpoint in under 5 minutes per frame. As a result of the Quadro board, I was able to complete an animated project of 300 frames in one evening instead of weeks.
I have noticed that occasionally the board will hiccup and reset itself, but all I see when this happens is that the screen will flicker for a split second and then come back with a simple warning dialog box that basically says, "I had some trouble, but I'm okay now." The hiccups never interrupted my workflow or halted my rendering.
When you first pull this graphics card out of the box, it really is a thing of beauty (see Figure 1). It is a hefty board filling two slots with its own fan and a sleek design that lets you know that it really means business. The board was a monster to fit into my computer and I had to remove the hard drive to even get it installed, but once it was installed, I made a quick visit to the NVIDIA website for the latest driver. Once the driver was installed, it found and set my display to use my same previous settings. The entire installation process took less than an hour and I'm productive once again.
The first thing I tried once the card was up and running was to load a heavy scene provided by NVIDIA for the last review. The scene was a high-res model of a Bugatti Veyron car complete with detailed materials. I rendered the scene using 3ds Max's iray renderer with 500 iterations and it screamed through the job.
I used the exact same file with the same settings so I could compare the results to the previous graphics card. When this image (see Figure 2) was rendered with the Quadro K5000 graphics card, the image at 1300 by 900 was rendered in just over 5 minutes. The same scene was rendered again with the Quadro K5200 graphics card in just 3 minutes and 31 seconds.
Some of the credit needs to go to the software. The development teams behind 3ds Max and iray have also been busy updating their rendering pipeline and make the software more efficient. The software has also been designed to take advantage of the incredible hardware found in this graphics card.
Within the Technical Details document, the extent of the upgrade for this new board is explained. The first big difference is that the number of CUDA Cores has increased from 1536 for the K5000 board to 2304 for the K5200. The Memory Size has doubled from 4GB to 8GB and the Memory Bandwidth has also increased from 173 GB/s to 192 GB/s. This allows data to be pumped to the board faster. The Single Precision Computer Performance as measured against standardized benchmarks has increased from 2.2 TFLOPS to 3.0 TFLOPS. The only other difference is that the K5200 card consumed more power at 150W verses 122W for the K5000 card.
Each Quadro graphics board can be connected to up to four monitors per GPU. This gives you ample real-estate to keep everything with your project organized. The direct outputs from the board include two Display Ports, one Dual-Link DVI-I and one Dual-Link DVI-D. The Quadro K5200, like its predecessor, also supports Quadro Sync, which allows up to four K5200 boards to work together to synchronize 16 monitors simultaneously (see Figure 3). This requires a separate Quadro Sync card.
The Quadro 5000 board also supports OpenGL 4.4, Shader Model 5.0 and DirectX 11.
In summary, several years ago, I was blown away with the speed and power of the Quadro K5000 graphics board and the new Quadro K5200 graphics board improves on the original. I found installation and setup to be simple and quick and the graphics board has worked seamlessly with all my 3d modeling, animation and rendering packages.
You can find more information on 3ds Max and NVIDIA iray at the www.autodesk.com web site and more information on the Quadro line of professional graphics cards is available at www.nvidia.com/quadro.
First, a little follow up on the previous board. I've been using the Quadro K5000 board in my machine since writing the review and it works so well that I don't notice it is even there, except when I render a seriously complex scene. When it cranks up to full steam, I can hear its fan kick on and start spinning. Needless to say, it kicks on quite a lot. The Quadro board has literally saved me hundreds of hours or render time that I've taken for granted.
A good example of this is a realistic Earth rendering project that I recently worked on. The scene used high-res maps of the Earth surface along with two layers of cloud data. The textures for the scene were almost 3GB in size. When I rendered this complex scene it took some time to load all the textures into memory, but once loaded, I could render the Earth from any viewpoint in under 5 minutes per frame. As a result of the Quadro board, I was able to complete an animated project of 300 frames in one evening instead of weeks.
I have noticed that occasionally the board will hiccup and reset itself, but all I see when this happens is that the screen will flicker for a split second and then come back with a simple warning dialog box that basically says, "I had some trouble, but I'm okay now." The hiccups never interrupted my workflow or halted my rendering.
The Installation
When you first pull this graphics card out of the box, it really is a thing of beauty (see Figure 1). It is a hefty board filling two slots with its own fan and a sleek design that lets you know that it really means business. The board was a monster to fit into my computer and I had to remove the hard drive to even get it installed, but once it was installed, I made a quick visit to the NVIDIA website for the latest driver. Once the driver was installed, it found and set my display to use my same previous settings. The entire installation process took less than an hour and I'm productive once again.
Figure 1: The NVIDIA Quadro K5200 graphics board looks like a self-contained system itself. Image provided by NVIDIA.
First Impressions
The first thing I tried once the card was up and running was to load a heavy scene provided by NVIDIA for the last review. The scene was a high-res model of a Bugatti Veyron car complete with detailed materials. I rendered the scene using 3ds Max's iray renderer with 500 iterations and it screamed through the job.
I used the exact same file with the same settings so I could compare the results to the previous graphics card. When this image (see Figure 2) was rendered with the Quadro K5000 graphics card, the image at 1300 by 900 was rendered in just over 5 minutes. The same scene was rendered again with the Quadro K5200 graphics card in just 3 minutes and 31 seconds.
Figure 2: This beautiful model of a Bugatti Veyron was rendered using the NVIDIA Quadro K5200 graphics card in just 3 minutes and 31 seconds.
Some of the credit needs to go to the software. The development teams behind 3ds Max and iray have also been busy updating their rendering pipeline and make the software more efficient. The software has also been designed to take advantage of the incredible hardware found in this graphics card.
Upgrade Details
Within the Technical Details document, the extent of the upgrade for this new board is explained. The first big difference is that the number of CUDA Cores has increased from 1536 for the K5000 board to 2304 for the K5200. The Memory Size has doubled from 4GB to 8GB and the Memory Bandwidth has also increased from 173 GB/s to 192 GB/s. This allows data to be pumped to the board faster. The Single Precision Computer Performance as measured against standardized benchmarks has increased from 2.2 TFLOPS to 3.0 TFLOPS. The only other difference is that the K5200 card consumed more power at 150W verses 122W for the K5000 card.
Each Quadro graphics board can be connected to up to four monitors per GPU. This gives you ample real-estate to keep everything with your project organized. The direct outputs from the board include two Display Ports, one Dual-Link DVI-I and one Dual-Link DVI-D. The Quadro K5200, like its predecessor, also supports Quadro Sync, which allows up to four K5200 boards to work together to synchronize 16 monitors simultaneously (see Figure 3). This requires a separate Quadro Sync card.
Figure 3: Several Quadro graphics boards that can synchronized to create a "power wall" of monitors. Image provided by NVIDA.
The Quadro 5000 board also supports OpenGL 4.4, Shader Model 5.0 and DirectX 11.
Summary
In summary, several years ago, I was blown away with the speed and power of the Quadro K5000 graphics board and the new Quadro K5200 graphics board improves on the original. I found installation and setup to be simple and quick and the graphics board has worked seamlessly with all my 3d modeling, animation and rendering packages.
You can find more information on 3ds Max and NVIDIA iray at the www.autodesk.com web site and more information on the Quadro line of professional graphics cards is available at www.nvidia.com/quadro.