NVIDIA Quadro K510M vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 SLI (Laptop) vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q

NVIDIA Quadro K510M

The NVIDIA Quadro K510M is a DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.3 compatible graphics card for affordable mobile workstations. It is a Kepler-based GPU built on the GK107 chip with 192 out of 384 shader cores activated and is manufactured in 28nm at TSMC. The Quadro K510M is built for the Intel Shark Bay generation (Haswell) and is a successor to the Quadro K500M (Chief River platform). As a new feature, PCIe 3.0 is supported for the first time. The K510M usually comes with 1 GB GDDR5 VRAM clocked at 600 MHz (2400 MHz effective, 19.2 GB/s). 

The Quadro series offers certified drivers that are optimized for stability and performance in professional applications like CAD or DCC. OpenGL performance, for example, should be significantly better than with GeForce graphics cards of similar specifications.

Architecture

The Kepler architecture is the successor to the Fermi architecture that first appeared in laptops with the GeForce 400M series. The GK107 Kepler core offers two shader blocks, called SMX, that are clocked at the same speed as the central core. In the K510M, only one block is active leading to the 192 CUDA cores. Although more shader cores are available in the Kepler architecture as compared to the Fermi design, the Kepler shaders are still expected to be up to twice as power efficient. However, due to the missing hot clock of the shader domain, two shaders of a Kepler chip offer similar performance to just one shader of a Fermi chip (as the latter is clocked twice as fast).

Performance

The performance should be clearly above the old Quadro K500M, but somewhat below the higher clocked Quadro K610M. This would place the K510M between the consumer GPUs GeForce 710M and GT 720M. However, the exact core clock has not yet been confirmed. Nevertheless, most demanding games of 2013 will run fluently only in low detail settings.

Features

The improved feature set now includes support for up to 4 active displays. Furthermore, high resolution monitors of up to 3840 x 2160 pixels can now be connected using DisplayPort 1.2 or HDMI 1.4a if available. HD-Audio codecs, such as Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD, can be transmitted via bitstream mode through the HDMI port. However, as most laptops will feature Optimus, the integrated GPU will likely have direct control over the display ports and may limit the feature set available by the Nvidia Kepler cards. Please note: The K510M does not supprt 3D Vision Pro.

Using CUDA or OpenCL 1.2, the cores of the Quadro K510M can be used for general calculations.

The 5th generation PureVideo HD video processor (VP5) is also integrated in the GK107 core and offers hardware decoding of HD videos. Common codecs such as MPEG-1/2, MPEG-4 ASP, H.264 and VC1/WMV9 are fully supported up to 4K resolutions while VC1 and MPEG-4 are supported up to 1080p. Two streams can be decoded in parallel for features such as Picture-in-Picture. Another novelty is the inclusion of a dedicated video encoding engine similar to Intel QuickSync that can be accessed by the NVENC API.

The power consumption of the Quadro K510M is rated at a TGP of 30 W including the board and memory components. Therefore, the card is suited for medium-sized notebooks with 15-inch displays or greater.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 SLI (Laptop)

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 SLI for laptops is a combination of two GTX 1070 graphics cards in SLI mode. Each card renders one frame at a time (AFR mode) but depends for most games on a good profile in the driver. Therefore, the performance can range from no gains over a single GTX 1070 to up to 90% faster performance. In most games with SLI support, the GTX 1070 SLI is therefore faster than a single GTX 1080. However, sometimes the combination also suffers from micro-stuttering.

The technical details of the card are identical to a single GTX 1070 (see for more information) and the power consumption is doubled. Therefore, the 1070 SLI combination is only found in huge clunky laptops.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 with the Max-Q design is a mobile high-end GPU from the Pascal series. It is designed for thin and light laptops and about 10-15% slower than a regular GTX 1060 for laptops based on the cooling capabilities. The base frequency (1063-1265 MHz) is also much lower than on the regular GTX 1060 (1506 MHz, at least -16%) and the Boost (1341-1480 MHz) is also much lower compared to 1708 MHz (at least -13%) for the regular GTX 1060. The memory clock, however, is identical.

The clock is not the only difference compared to the regular GTX 1060 though. The drivers for the Max-Q version were optimized for efficiency (and not performance; only for Max-Q models), there are optimized voltage converters for 1V operation, high-end cooling methods, and a 40 dB limit for the fan noise (with clock adjustments to ensure this at all times).

Features

The GP106 chip is produced in 16nm FinFET at TSMC and offers a range of new features, like DisplayPort 1.4 (ready), HDMI 2.0b, HDR, Simultaneous Multi-Projection (SMP) and improved H.265 video de- and encoding (PlayReady 3.0). A list of improvements and features can be found in our article on the Pascal architecture.

The power consumption of the Max-Q design is notably lower than the normal GTX 1060 for laptops and ranges between 60 and 70 Watt (TGP) according to Nvidia.