First compute performance test results for Nvidia's Volta Tesla GPU revealed

Nvidia already began shipping the new Volta GV100 GPUs with the DGX-1 systems a few weeks ago. These systems are designed for the compute and deep learning markets, so the price points are up there, but consumer cards for gamers powered by the GV100 GPU are scheduled for early 2018. The green company released a wealth of information about the new Volta GPUs at the Hot Chips conference this year, however, the performance comparison between the Pascal P100 and the Volta V100 GPUs wasn’t showing any actual benchmark results. The lucky few who got their hands on the DGX-1 have recently posted Geekbench 4 results, and it turns out that the Volta GPUs are more than two times faster than their predecessor.
 
The DGX-1 comes with a custom-made card that integrates eight Tesla V100 GPUs, so there’s a total of 40,960 CUDA Cores and 5120 Tensor Cores coupled with 128 GB of HBM2 memory. Powering the system is the dual Intel Xeon E5-2698 V4 CPU setup clocked at 2.2 GHz that adds 20 core / 40 threads to the total processing power. The CPUs use 512 GB of DDR4 memory, whereas the storage is provided by a quad 1.92 TB SSD setup configured in RAID 0. There’s also a custom-made 3.2 KW PSU coming with the system. Nvidia sells these monsters for US$149,000.

Now that we have a frame of reference for the actual processing power involved, the Geekbench 4 results might not surprise us that much anymore. The Volta DGX-1 managed to score 418,504 points for the OpenCL API test and 743,537 points for the CUDA API test. This is over two times faster than the Pascal-based Tesla P100 with 8 PCIe cards that manages to score 320,031 points in the CUDA API tests.

While these tests don’t seem too relevant for gamers, the performance gains in the compute department should give us an idea about the gaming performance of the Volta GPUs. If the GV100 chips prove to be more than two times faster than the current Pascal-based ones in games, then an upgrade to the upcoming GTX 2000 series might not be a bad idea after all.

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