Quadro No More? NVIDIA Announces Ampere-based RTX A6000 & A40 Video Cards For Pro Vis

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NVIDIA’s second GTC of 2020 is taking place this week, and as has quickly become a tradition, one of CEO Jensen Huang’s “kitchenside chats” kicks off the event. As the de facto replacement for GTC Europe, this fall virtual GTC is a bit of a lower-key event relative to the Spring edition, but it’s still one that is seeing some NVIDIA hardware introduced to the world.

Starting things off, we have a pair of new video cards from NVIDIA – and a launch that seemingly indicates that NVIDIA is getting ready to overhaul its professional visualization branding. Being announced today and set to ship at the end of the year is the NVIDIA RTX A6000, NVIDIA’s next-generation, Ampere-based professional visualization card. The successor to the Turing-based Quadro RTX 8000/6000, the A6000 will be NVIDIA’s flagship professional graphics card, offering everything under the sun as far as NVIDIA’s graphics features go, and chart-topping performance to back it up. The A6000 will be a Quadro card in everything but name; literally.

The first professional visualization card to be launched based on NVIDIA’s new Ampere architecture, the A6000 will have NVIDIA hitting the market with its best foot forward. The card uses a fully-enabled GA102 GPU – the same chip used in the GeForce RTX 3080 & 3090 – and with 48GB of memory, is packed with as much memory as NVIDIA can put on a single GA102 card today. Notably, the A6000 is using GDDR6 here and not the faster GDDR6X used in the GeForce cards, as 16Gb density RAM chips are not available for the latter memory at this time. As a result, despite being based on the same GPU, there are going to be some interesting performance differences between the A6000 and its GeForce siblings, as it has traded memory bandwidth for overall memory capacity.

In terms of performance, NVIDIA is promoting the A6000 as offering nearly twice the performance (or more) of the Quadro RTX 8000 in certain situations, particularly tasks taking advantage of the significant increase in FP32 CUDA cores or the similar performance increase in RT core throughput. Unfortunately NVIDIA has either yet to lock down the specifications for the card or is opting against announcing them at this time, so we don’t know what the clockspeeds and resulting performance in FLOPS will be. Notably, the A6000 only has a TDP of 300W, 50W lower than the GeForce RTX 3090, so I would expect this card to be clocked lower than the 3090.

Otherwise, as we saw with the GeForce cards launched last month, Ampere itself is not a major technological overhaul to the previous Turing architecture. So while newer and significantly more powerful, there are not many new marquee features to be found on the card. Along with the expanded number of data types supported in the tensor cores (particularly BFloat16), the other changes most likely to be noticed by professional visualization users is decode support for the new AV1 codec, as well as PCI-Express 4.0 support, which will give the cards twice the bus bandwidth when used with AMD’s recent platforms.

Like the current-generation Quadro, the upcoming card also gets ECC support. NVIDIA has never listed GA102 as offering ECC on its internal pathways – this is traditionally limited to their big, datacenter-class chips – so this is almost certainly partial support via “soft” ECC, which offers error correction against the DRAM and DRAM bus by setting aside some DRAM capacity and bandwidth to function as ECC. The cards also support a single NVLink connector – now up to NVLink 3 – allowing for a pair of A6000s to be bridged together for more performance and to share their memory pools for supported applications. The A6000 also supports NVIDIA’s standard frame lock and 3D Vision Pro features with their respective connectors.

For display outputs, the A6000 ships with a quad-DisplayPort configuration, which is typical for NVIDIA’s high-end professional visualization cards. Notably this generation, however, this means the A6000 is in a bit of an odd spot since DisplayPort 1.4 is slower than the HDMI 2.1 standard also supported by the GA102 GPU. I would expect that it’s possible for the card to drive an HDMI 2.1 display with a passive adapter, but this is going to be reliant on how NVIDIA has configured the card and if HDMI 2.1 signaling will tolerate such an adapter.

Finally, the A6000 will be the first of today’s video cards to ship. According to NVIDIA, the card will be available in the channel as an add-in card starting in mid-December – just in time to make a 2020 launch. The card will then start showing up in OEM systems in early 2021.
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