NVIDIA Quadro P3000 Max-Q vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 870M vs NVIDIA Quadro P2000

NVIDIA Quadro P3000 Max-Q

The Nvidia Quadro P3000 Max-Q (official Nvidia Quadro P3000 with Max-Q Design) is a mobile high-end workstation graphics card for notebooks. Similar to the consumer GeForce GTX 1060 (Laptop), it is based on the GP106 chip with 1280 shaders. The graphics card is the more efficient version of the normal Quadro P3000 with slightly reduced clock speeds at a much reduced power consumption (60 Watt versus 75 Watt TGP).

The Quadro GPUs offer certified drivers, which are optimized for stability and performance in professional applications (CAD, DCC, medical, prospection, and visualizing applications). The performance in these areas is therefore much better compared to corresponding consumer GPUs.

Performance

The theoretical performance should be only slightly below the normal Quadro P3000 (as it was with the Max-Q GTX 1060 versus the normal GTX 1060).

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 870M

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 870M is a high-end DirectX 12-compatible graphics card for laptops unveiled in March 2014. Similar to the GTX 880M, it is based on the 28 nm GK104 chip (Kepler architecture), but features less shader cores (1344 instead of 1536) as well as smaller and slower memory (6 GB GDDR5).

Architecture

The Kepler architecture is the successor to the Fermi architecture that first appeared in laptops with the GeForce 400M series. The GK104 Kepler core offers eight shader blocks, called SMX, that are clocked at the same speed as the central core. In the GTX 870M, only seven blocks are active for a total of 1344 CUDA cores and 112 TMUs. The chip can access up to 6 GB of GDDR5 memory (1250 MHz, 5000 MHz effective) connected via a 192-bit interface.

Performance

Compared to the old GeForce GTX 770M, the GTX 870M offers significantly more performance thanks to its higher clock rate and the additional shaders. Therefore, the 870M is just slightly slower than the GTX 680MX and the Radeon R9 M290X. The GPU has enough power to run demanding games of 2013/2014 (e.g. Battlefield 4 or Thief) fluently in FullHD resolution and very high detail settings.

Features

The feature set includes support for up to 4 active displays. Furthermore, high resolution monitors of up to 3840x2160 pixels can 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.

The 5th generation PureVideo HD video processor (VP5) is also integrated in the GK104 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.

New features of the GTX 800M series include Battery Boost (longer battery life while playing games), Shadowplay (recording of in-game videos) and Game Stream (stream PC games on the Nvidia Shield console).

Power Consumption

The power consumption of the GeForce GTX 870M should be similar to the the GTX 780M, leading to a TDP of at least 100 W. Therefore, only large desktop replacements can handle the power demands of a GTX 870M.

NVIDIA Quadro P2000

The Nvidia Quadro P2000 is a mobile mid-range workstation graphics card for notebooks. Similar to the consumer GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (Laptop), it is based on the GP107 chip with 768 shaders. The graphics card is designed for the Kaby Lake / Coffee Lake generation.

The Quadro GPUs offer certified drivers, which are optimized for stability and performance in professional applications (CAD, DCC, medical, prospection, and visualizing applications). The performance in these areas is therefore much better compared to corresponding consumer GPUs.

Performance

The theoretical performance should be similar with the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (if the clocks did not take a massive hit).