NVIDIA Quadro GP100 vs NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation Comparison

Where Each One Wins

The recorded data presents a starkly one-sided comparison. The NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation wins the single shared benchmark test, Geekbench OpenCL, with a score of 311,629 against 87,445 for the NVIDIA Quadro GP100. That is a delta of 256.4%, meaning the RTX 6000 Ada delivers roughly three and a half times the raw compute throughput in this workload. There are no benchmark categories in the database where the Quadro GP100 comes out ahead, so the use-case split is defined entirely by what the RTX 6000 Ada can do that the older card cannot, rather than by any reciprocal advantage.

The RTX 6000 Ada also holds a second recorded score in Geekbench Vulkan at 262,845, a test the Quadro GP100 does not appear in at all. This matters for any workload that relies on modern graphics APIs. The RTX 6000 Ada supports DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2) and Vulkan 1.4, while the Quadro GP100 is limited to DirectX 12 (12_1) and Vulkan 1.3. For rendering pipelines, ray tracing, or compute tasks that lean on current API feature sets, the RTX 6000 Ada is the only one of the two that can even participate fully. The Quadro GP100 has no ray tracing cores and no tensor cores listed in the database, so any task that depends on those hardware units is simply unavailable on that card.

Looking at the average benchmark score, the RTX 6000 Ada sits at 287,237, which places it in the 99th percentile of all GPUs in the database. The Quadro GP100, with an average score of 87,445, sits in the 93rd percentile. Both are high performers relative to the broader GPU landscape, but the gap between them is enormous. The RTX 6000 Ada is not merely faster, it is in a different performance tier altogether, and its nearest rivals in the database reflect that positioning. The RTX 6000 Ada is 1.1% ahead of the NVIDIA L40 and 14.4% ahead of the NVIDIA L20, but 2.9% behind the L40S and 9.7% behind the AMD Instinct MI300X. The Quadro GP100, by contrast, is only 0.4% ahead of the AMD Radeon PRO W7600 and 2.1% ahead of the NVIDIA CMP 40HX, while trailing the NVIDIA RTX A4500 Mobile by 4% and the RTX A4500 by 4.6%.

Architecture Differences

The two cards come from completely different architectural eras. The RTX 6000 Ada is built on the Ada Lovelace architecture using the AD102 chip, fabricated on a 5 nm process at TSMC. The Quadro GP100 uses the Pascal architecture with the GP100 chip, fabricated on a 16 nm process, also at TSMC. The process node difference is the single largest architectural gulf between them, and it shows across every major specification.

Transistor counts tell the story clearly. The RTX 6000 Ada packs 76,300 million transistors on a 609 mm² die, yielding a transistor density of 125.3 million per square millimeter. The Quadro GP100 contains 15,300 million transistors on a 610 mm² die, for a density of just 25.1 million per square millimeter. The die sizes are nearly identical, 609 mm² versus 610 mm², which makes the density comparison particularly stark: the Ada chip crams roughly five times more transistors into the same physical footprint. That is the fundamental reason the RTX 6000 Ada can deliver so much more performance per clock and per watt.

The compute resources diverge dramatically. The RTX 6000 Ada has 18,176 shading units, 568 texture mapping units, and 192 render output units. The Quadro GP100 has 3,584 shading units, 224 TMUs, and 96 ROPs. The RTX 6000 Ada also includes 142 ray tracing cores and 568 tensor cores, while the Quadro GP100 lists none of either. The FP32 throughput is 91.06 TFLOPS for the RTX 6000 Ada versus 10.34 TFLOPS for the Quadro GP100, a roughly 8.8x difference. FP16 is 91.06 TFLOPS (1:1) on the Ada card and 20.69 TFLOPS (2:1) on the Pascal card. Interestingly, the Quadro GP100 actually had a higher FP16 rate relative to its FP32 performance, but the absolute numbers are still far below the newer card.

Clock speeds also reflect the architectural gap, though not in the direction one might expect from older hardware. The Quadro GP100 has a base clock of 1304 MHz and a boost clock of 1443 MHz, while the RTX 6000 Ada has a base clock of 915 MHz and a boost clock of 2505 MHz. The older Pascal card actually starts at a higher base frequency, but the Ada card boosts much higher, and with far more execution units, the aggregate throughput advantage is overwhelming. The memory subsystems are equally different. The RTX 6000 Ada uses 48 GB of GDDR6 on a 384 bit bus, with 960.0 GB/s of bandwidth and a 2500 MHz memory clock (20 Gbps effective). The Quadro GP100 uses 16 GB of HBM2 on a 4096 bit bus, with 732.2 GB/s of bandwidth and a 715 MHz memory clock (1430 Mbps effective). The Ada card has three times the capacity and roughly 31% more bandwidth, despite the far narrower bus, because GDDR6 runs at much higher effective speeds.

The Verdict

The data points in a single direction. The NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation is the superior card for every workload represented in the database, and the margin is not close. The Geekbench OpenCL score is 256.4% higher, the average benchmark score is 287,237 versus 87,445, and the Ada card holds a 99th percentile ranking versus 93rd for the Quadro GP100. If a workload fits on either GPU, the RTX 6000 Ada will complete it faster, often dramatically so.

Who should pick the Quadro GP100? The database offers essentially no performance scenario where that card wins. It has 16 GB of HBM2 memory versus 48 GB of GDDR6, lower bandwidth, fewer shading units, no ray tracing or tensor cores, and support for older API versions. The only areas where the Quadro GP100 is not strictly inferior are power consumption and the power connector. It draws 235 W versus 300 W for the RTX 6000 Ada, uses a single 8-pin connector rather than a 16-pin connector, and suggests a 550 W power supply versus 700 W. For a system with strict power or connector constraints, the Quadro GP100 could be the only option that physically fits. It is also a dual-slot card with nearly identical dimensions: 267 mm length and 111 mm height versus 267 mm length and 112 mm height for the Ada card. The bus interface is older, PCIe 3.0 x16 versus PCIe 4.0 x16, which matters for data transfer but not for compute throughput once data is resident in VRAM.

Who should pick the RTX 6000 Ada? Anyone whose workload benefits from compute throughput, modern API support, large memory capacity, or hardware ray tracing and tensor acceleration. The 48 GB frame buffer is three times the size of the Quadro GP100's 16 GB, which matters for large models, high-resolution rendering, or any dataset that needs to stay resident in VRAM. The 99th percentile ranking among all GPUs in the database indicates this is a top-tier accelerator even by modern standards, while the Quadro GP100's 93rd percentile reflects a card that was high-end in its generation but has since been overtaken by far more capable hardware. The RTX 6000 Ada also has a successor listed, Blackwell PRO W, while the Quadro GP100's successor is Quadro Volta, meaning both are end-of-life, but the Ada card is far closer to the current performance frontier.

FAQ

Q: How much faster is the RTX 6000 Ada than the Quadro GP100 in OpenCL?

A: The RTX 6000 Ada scores 311,629 in Geekbench OpenCL, which is 256.4% higher than the Quadro GP100's 87,445.

Q: Does the Quadro GP100 support ray tracing?

A: No. The database lists no ray tracing cores for the Quadro GP100, while the RTX 6000 Ada includes 142 RT cores.

Q: Which card has more memory bandwidth?

A: The RTX 6000 Ada has 960.0 GB/s of bandwidth from 48 GB of GDDR6 on a 384 bit bus. The Quadro GP100 has 732.2 GB/s from 16 GB of HBM2 on a 4096 bit bus.

Q: Are both cards still in production?

A: No. Both are marked as end-of-life in the database.

Q: What is the average benchmark score difference?

A: The RTX 6000 Ada has an average benchmark score of 287,237, compared to 87,445 for the Quadro GP100. The Ada card is in the 99th percentile of all GPUs, while the GP100 is in the 93rd percentile.

Q: Which card has higher power consumption?

A: The RTX 6000 Ada is rated at 300 W with a 700 W suggested power supply. The Quadro GP100 is rated at 235 W with a 550 W suggested power supply.

Head-to-Head Benchmarks

The only head-to-head benchmark in the database is Geekbench OpenCL, and the result is decisive. The RTX 6000 Ada Generation scores 311,629, while the Quadro GP100 scores 87,445. That is a delta of 256.4%, meaning the Ada card delivers more than three times the OpenCL performance of the Pascal card. To put that in context, the RTX 6000 Ada's nearest rivals in the database are the NVIDIA L40 at 284,111 (1.1% behind the Ada card), the NVIDIA L40S at 295,763 (2.9% ahead), the AMD Instinct MI300X at 317,994 (9.7% ahead), and the NVIDIA L20 at 251,147 (14.4% behind). The Quadro GP100, meanwhile, sits among much weaker competition: the AMD Radeon PRO W7600 at 87,108 (0.4% behind), the NVIDIA CMP 40HX at 85,637 (2.1% behind), the NVIDIA RTX A4500 Mobile at 91,134 (4% ahead), and the NVIDIA RTX A4500 at 91,671 (4.6% ahead). The gap between the two cards in this test is far larger than the gap between either card and its nearest rivals, which reinforces how different their performance tiers are.

Beyond OpenCL, the RTX 6000 Ada also has a recorded Geekbench Vulkan score of 262,845. The Quadro GP100 has no Vulkan score in the database, so no direct comparison is possible, but the existence of the score itself indicates the Ada card can run the Vulkan workload while the GP100 either was not tested or could not complete it. Given the API support differences, Vulkan 1.4 versus 1.3, the Ada card's newer feature set likely contributes to its ability to handle modern compute and graphics workloads more efficiently.

The texture and pixel rates follow the same pattern. The RTX 6000 Ada has a texture rate of 1,422.8 GTexel/s and a pixel rate of 481.0 GPixel/s. The Quadro GP100 has 323.2 GTexel/s and 138.5 GPixel/s. These are derived from the shading unit counts and clock speeds, but they represent the practical throughput for texture-heavy and fill-rate-bound workloads. The Ada card is roughly 4.4x faster in texturing and 3.5x faster in pixel throughput. The FP32 compute gap, 91.06 TFLOPS versus 10.34 TFLOPS, is even larger at roughly 8.8x, which is the headline number for compute-heavy tasks. FP16 is closer in relative terms, 91.06 TFLOPS versus 20.69 TFLOPS, but still a 4.4x advantage for the Ada card. The Quadro GP100's FP16 ratio of 2:1 versus the Ada card's 1:1 shows the older card was designed to give extra FP16 throughput, but the newer card simply has so many more execution units that the absolute FP16 performance is still far higher.

Specification Differences

The two cards differ across essentially every technical specification in the database. The RTX 6000 Ada is built on a 5 nm process at TSMC with 76,300 million transistors on a 609 mm² die, while the Quadro GP100 uses a 16 nm process with 15,300 million transistors on a 610 mm² die. Transistor density is 125.3 million per mm² for the Ada card versus 25.1 million per mm² for the Pascal card.

The memory configurations are entirely different. The RTX 6000 Ada has 48 GB of GDDR6 on a 384 bit bus with 960.0 GB/s bandwidth and a 2500 MHz memory clock (20 Gbps effective). The Quadro GP100 has 16 GB of HBM2 on a 4096 bit bus with 732.2 GB/s bandwidth and a 715 MHz memory clock (1430 Mbps effective). The Ada card has three times the capacity and 31% more bandwidth.

Compute resources: the RTX 6000 Ada has 18,176 shading units, 568 TMUs, 192 ROPs, 142 RT cores, and 568 tensor cores. The Quadro GP100 has 3,584 shading units, 224 TMUs, 96 ROPs, and no RT or tensor cores listed. FP32 is 91.06 TFLOPS versus 10.34 TFLOPS. FP16 is 91.06 TFLOPS (1:1) versus 20.69 TFLOPS (2:1).

Clock speeds: the RTX 6000 Ada has a 915 MHz base and 2505 MHz boost. The Quadro GP100 has a 1304 MHz base and 1443 MHz boost. The Pascal card starts higher but boosts far lower.

Power and physical specs: the RTX 6000 Ada is 300 W with a 1x 16-pin connector and a 700 W suggested PSU. The Quadro GP100 is 235 W with a 1x 8-pin connector and a 550 W suggested PSU. Both are dual-slot cards with similar dimensions: the Ada card is 267 mm by 112 mm, the GP100 is 267 mm by 111 mm.

Bus and outputs: the RTX 6000 Ada uses PCIe 4.0 x16 and has 4x DisplayPort 1.4a. The Quadro GP100 uses PCIe 3.0 x16 and has 1x DVI plus 4x DisplayPort 1.4a.

API support: the RTX 6000 Ada supports DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2), OpenGL 4.6, and Vulkan 1.4. The Quadro GP100 supports DirectX 12 (12_1), OpenGL 4.6, and Vulkan 1.3.

Release and lifecycle: the RTX 6000 Ada was released on 2022-12-02 with a launch MSRP of 6,799 USD and a listed successor of Blackwell PRO W. The Quadro GP100 was released on 2016-09-30 with no launch MSRP listed and a successor of Quadro Volta. Both are end-of-life.