Nvidia has yet to officially reveal Blackwell-based graphics boards for professional visualization (ProViz) applications, but such cards are already undergoing testing in the wild by interested parties inGeekbench. An OpenCL benchmark result of Nvidia’s upcoming RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition graphics card has emerged, confirming rumored specifications of the GPU and memory while raising questions about performance.
Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition add-in-board is based on the GB202 graphics processing unit (GPU) with 24,064 CUDA cores (188 streaming multiprocessors, 128 CUDA cores) allegedly operating at up to 2,617 MHz and carries 96 GB of memory with ECC, according to the Geekbench listing. By contrast, Nvidia’sGeForce RTX 5090— thebest graphics cardfor gaming money can buy these days — features the GB202 GPU with 21,760 CUDA cores operating at up to 2,410 MHz and carries 32 GB of GDDR7 memory.
At first glance, the new RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition graphics board should easily beat its gaming counterpart, but this is not the case as the unit scores368,219points in GB6 6.4.0 OpenCL benchmark, whereas the GeForce RTX 5090 can score around376,858in the same benchmark. A 2.3% performance difference is hardly a big deal, but given significant hardware differences between the boards, it is natural to expect the new ProViz card to beat the gaming board.
368,219
376,858
63,762
75,075
263.9 images/sec
310.7 images/sec
60,254
73,968
196.7 images/sec
241.5 images/sec
684,753
637,294
21.3 Gpixels/sec
19.8 Gpixels/sec
864,739
838,261
32.1 Gpixels/sec
31.1 Gpixels/sec
832,815
795,994
36.3 Gpixels/sec
34.7 Gpixels/sec
57,199
57,464
2.25 Gpixels/sec
2.27 Gpixels/sec
2,797,728
2,802,350
2.66 Tpixels/sec
1,114,648
1,069,886
49056.6 FPS
47086.6 FPS
However, there are a couple of caveats. First up, we are dealing with a pre-release product with pre-release drivers, so the performance of the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition can improve when it is launched with final drivers. Secondly, the TGP of the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell WE can be capped, and therefore its compute performance is lower than that of the GeForce RTX 5090, which can go all the way to 575W. Thirdly, the current driver limits memory visible to OpenCL applications to 24 GB (well, 23.8 GB, according to thedetailed GB6 results) even though the unit carries 96 GB onboard. This proves that the driver is not final.
Also, it should be noted that based on a previous report, this the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell is not Nvidia’s flagship ProViz offering, as the range-topping model isexpected to be called the RTX Pro 6000 X Blackwell.
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Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
