Power draw increased to make flagship RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell faster than consumer GeForce RTX 5090
Nvidia has launched the Nvidia RTX Pro Blackwell generation of professional workstation GPUs for desktops and laptops, with significantly improved AI and ray tracing capabilities.
The new GPUs also support DLSS 4, the latest release of Nvidia’s real time neural rendering technology, where 15 out of every 16 pixels can be generated by AI, which is much faster than rendering pixels in the traditional way.
According to Nvidia, in arch viz software D5 Render, enabling DLSS 4 can lead to a four-fold increase in frame rates, leading to much smoother navigation of complex scenes.
Of the new desktop GPUs, the flagship Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition features a whopping 96 GB of GDDR7 memory, double that of the previous Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation. This opens up the Nvidia RTX Pro family to even more demanding workflows in AI, simulation and visualisation.
Nvidia is billing the new dual slot board as the most powerful desktop GPU ever created. On paper, it outpaces the 32 GB consumer-focused Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, which launched earlier this year. With a slightly beefier chip, the RTX Pro offers better single-precision performance and is also faster in AI and Ray Tracing workloads.
This marks a change in strategy for Nvidia, as the company’s top-end workstation GPUs usually run slower than their consumer GeForce equivalents.
One of the reasons for this is that workstation cards usually draw less power. But this is not the case for the Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition, which goes up to 600W, a massive step up from the 300W Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPU and slightly more than the 575W Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090.
This increased power draw will likely have an impact on how the new chip is deployed by the workstation OEMs. While some high-end desktops can physically house up to three or four dual slot GPUs, we don’t expect many will be able to handle the thermal demands of multiple Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition GPUs.
This is probably why Nvidia has also launched the Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Max-Q Workstation Edition. It offers similar specs, but in a more familiar 300W package, translating to around 12% less performance across the board – CUDA, AI and RT.
Other new workstations additions include the Nvidia RTX Pro 5000 Blackwell (48 GB) (300W), Nvidia RTX Pro 4500 Blackwell (32 GB) (200W), and Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 Blackwell (24 GB) (140W), each with slightly more memory than their Ada Generation predecessors. All new Blackwell RTX Pro boards feature 4 x DisplayPort 2.1 connectors.
For mobile workstations, Nvidia has launched a much broader range of laptop GPUs. This includes the Nvidia RTX Pro 5000 Blackwell (24 GB), RTX Pro 4000 Blackwell (16 GB), RTX Pro 3000 Blackwell (12 GB), RTX Pro 2000 Blackwell (8 GB), RTX Pro 1000 Blackwell (8 GB) and RTX Pro 500 Blackwell (6 GB). The RTX Pro 5000 Blackwell stands out because it has 50% more memory than its predecessor, the Nvidia RTX 5000 Ada Generation, which should make a big difference in some workflows.
The new laptop chips will be found in mobile workstations, such as the HP ZBook Fury G1i, available in both a 16″ and an all-new 18″ form factor.
Nvidia has also launched the Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Server Edition, a successor to the Nvidia L40 data centre GPU, which along with the new ‘Pro’ branding now makes it much easier to understand Nvidia’s entire pro GPU lineup.
The data centre GPU can be combined with Nvidia vGPU software to power AI workloads across virtualised environments and deliver ‘high-performance virtual workstation instances to remote users.
