Back to all articles The RTX 4000 is the New Mid-range Workstation King Published:
While all the attention may have been stolen by RTX gaming cards, Turing has come for the professional market with a vengeance. The RTX 4000 brings a lot that’s new to workstation life and we have the details.
The nature of professional workstation graphics cards means that they will almost always trail behind consumer cards meant for gaming and entertainment. After all, these pro cards are not released until the company is satisfied that they are stable and compatible with mission-critical software packages in various industries.
That means Quadro users have spent some time being mildly jealous of features such as ray tracing on consumer RTX cards, while waiting for Turing to put on its business suit. Now that wait is over and the RTX 4000 is leading the charge as the card most people are probably going to buy.
Workhorse Numbers The Quadro RTX 4000 is a single slot card with 36 ray tracing cores, 288 Turing Tensor cores and 40% more memory bandwidth than the outgoing P4000 Quadro. In terms of performance, it’s about equivalent to the RTX 2070 consumer card, but of course with all the professional bells and whistles added.
That’s really respectable and puts the RTX 4000 in the rarified air shared by a handful of faster cards. The most shocking number however, has to be its price. At less than a thousand dollars, it’s amazing value for money. You get strong GPU performance, all the deep learning technology and the promise of error-free work in rendering packages and scientific research software.
The one caveat is that with “only” 8GB of RAM the card may be limited when processing truly huge datasets. It’s currently the RTX Quadro with the lowest amount of VRAM, with the next card in line (the 5000) sporting 32GB and the RTX 8000 flagship hitting a whopping 48GB. So be mindful of the memory requirements your envisioned jobs will have.
For professionals working in CAD, 3D modelling and other GPU-bound workloads, this is looking like a mighty fine deal indeed.
