Nvidia has released a brand new flagship workstation graphics card, which the company claims is the "most capable GPU ever built." Indeed, it's hard to argue that claim since the card, called the Quadro K6000, offers five times higher compute performance and double the graphics capability of its predecessor, the Quadro 6000.

The Quadro K6000 offers few compromises, boasting 12GB of ultra-fast GDDR5 graphical memory and 2,880 streaming multiprocessor (SMX) cores — all based on the Nvidia Kepler architecture. This means that, despite its beefy specs, the K6000 sports a relatively power efficient design.

Either way, this card allows designers and animators to model and render characters and scenes of unprecedented scale and complexity. It also supports up to four simultaneous displays and up to 4k resolution with DisplayPort 1.2, while boasting ultra-low latency video I/O and support for large-scale visualizations.

No pricing has yet been revealed for the K6000 but, given that the Quadro K5000 costs around $2,250, it's likely to be out of reach for many smaller organizations. In fact, Nvidia has stated that the K6000 is aimed directly at leading studios and companies, such as Pixar, Nissan, Apache Corporation and the Weather Channel's WSI (News - Alert) division.

Fortunately, the Nvidia Quadro series has lower end offerings — such as the Quadro K4000 and Quadro K2000, which were released earlier this year — more suitable for companies with a smaller budget.

"The NVIDIA (News - Alert) Quadro K6000 GPU is the highest performance, most capable GPU ever created for the professional graphics market," said Ed Ellett, senior vice president, Professional Solutions Group at NVIDIA. "It will significantly change the game for animators, digital designers and engineers, enabling them to make the impossible possible."

Nvidia also introduced a new flagship professional GPU, the K5100M, for workstation notebooks alongside the K6000. The K5100M is meant to anchor a whole new line of workstation GPUs for laptops, with seven models altogether.