NVIDIA unveils RTX PRO Blackwell GPUs for AI & design

NVIDIA has announced the introduction of the RTX PRO Blackwell series, a new generation of graphics processing units (GPUs) designed for professional use in workstations and servers, aiming to enhance performance for a range of industries including AI, design, and scientific computing.

The series offers a variety of models targeting different setups, from desktop to data centre and laptops. The models include the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition, RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition, and RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell, among others. The GPUs are designed to enhance capabilities in agentic AI, simulation, and high-performance computing applications.

"Software developers, data scientists, artists, designers and engineers need powerful AI and graphics performance to push the boundaries of visual computing and simulation, helping tackle incredible industry challenges," stated Bob Pette, Vice President of Enterprise Platforms at NVIDIA.

"Bringing NVIDIA Blackwell to workstations and servers will take productivity, performance and speed to new heights, accelerating AI inference serving, data science, visualisation and content creation."

The Blackwell series GPUs feature several advanced technologies such as the NVIDIA Streaming Multiprocessor, Fourth-Generation RT Cores, and Fifth-Generation Tensor Cores.

They also include expanded memory capabilities with new GDDR7 memory, improved video encoding and decoding through NVIDIA NVENC and NVDEC, and enhanced display performance with DisplayPort 2.1.

The multi-instance GPU (MIG) technology in the RTX PRO 6000 and 5000 series allows for secure partitioning of resources, enabling more efficient allocation for diverse workloads. This flexibility supports higher performance across varied tasks.

The Blackwell series supports NVIDIA Blackwell Max-Q technologies for laptops, optimising performance and power efficiency.

The GPUs are also integrated into enterprise data centre environments, with the RTX PRO 6000 Server Edition designed for high-density configurations and virtualised environments using NVIDIA vGPU software.

Martha Tsigkari, Head of Applied Research and Development at Foster + Partners, said of the new series, "The new NVIDIA Blackwell GPU has managed to outperform everything we have tested before. For example, when using it with Cyclops, it has performed at 5x the speed of NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPUs. Rendering speeds increased 5x, allowing tools like Cyclops to provide feedback on how well our design solutions perform in real time as we design them."

Rekha Ranganathan, Senior Executive at GE HealthCare, highlighted the improvements: "Early evaluation of the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell technology by GE HealthCare's engineering team has found the potential for up to 2x GPU processing time improvement on reconstruction algorithms, which could lead to significant benefit to customers."

Jeff Hammoud, Chief Design Officer at Rivian, shared insights on graphics quality: "NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition GPUs enable incredibly sharp and photorealistic graphics. In conjunction with a Varjo XR4 headset and Autodesk VRED, the system delivered the level of crispness necessary for immersive automotive design reviews."

Shaun Greene, Director of Industry Solutions at SoftServe, noted productivity gains: "The 96GB memory and massive AI processing power in the NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition GPU has boosted our productivity up to 3x with AI models like Llama 3.3-70B and Mixtral 8x7b, the NVIDIA Omniverse platform and industrial copilots."

NVIDIA's new GPUs run on the NVIDIA AI platform, featuring larger memory and advanced Tensor Cores to support AI-accelerated applications.

The GPUs allow enterprises to accelerate AI development and offer the capacity to run demanding workloads both locally and at scale.