NVIDIA Quadro P5000

The NVIDIA Quadro P5000 is a Pascal-generation professional workstation card built on the GP104 chip, fabricated at TSMC on a 16 nm process with 7,200 million transistors across a 314 mm² die. It ships in a dual-slot form factor measuring 267 mm (10.5 inches) in length and 111 mm (4.4 inches) in height, and carries a launch MSRP of 2,499 USD. With 2,560 shading units, 160 texture mapping units, and 64 ROPs, the card delivers 8.873 TFLOPS of FP32 compute and a 52nd-percentile standing among all GPUs in the benchmark database, with an average benchmark score of 12,880. Pixel fill rate is 110.9 GPixel/s and texture fill rate is 277.3 GTexel/s, figures that reflect the card's balanced rasterization throughput for its generation. Released on September 30, 2016, it succeeded the Quadro Maxwell line and was later succeeded by the Quadro Volta family. The card connects via PCIe 3.0 x16 and is now marked as end-of-life. Its benchmark profile spans both legacy and modern APIs, which makes it an interesting data point for comparing Pascal-era professional hardware against integrated and mobile parts of later generations.

How It Compares

The Quadro P5000's closest rival is the AMD Radeon 740M, which averages 12,870 — a mere 0.1% behind the Quadro's 12,880 average. This is essentially a statistical tie; the P5000 edges ahead by a hair, but the two cards sit in the same performance class in aggregate benchmark terms. The 740M is an integrated part, while the P5000 is a full-size workstation card, yet their synthetic scores align closely.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 trails by 0.4%, averaging 12,830. Despite being a dual-GPU card from an older generation, the GTX 590 remains within striking distance of the P5000 in these aggregate metrics, though the Quadro's feature set and memory capacity put it in a different product category. The GTX 590's age shows in API support, while the P5000 carries modern interfaces.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Mobile leads the P5000 by 0.5%, averaging 12,940. That is a small but consistent margin; the mobile RTX part's newer architecture and feature support give it a slight edge in synthetic workloads, though the P5000 counters with substantially more VRAM and professional driver optimizations. The RTX part also brings dedicated ray tracing hardware, which the P5000 lacks.

The AMD FirePro W5100 is 0.7% behind, averaging 12,789. This is the largest gap among the four nearest rivals, yet still a narrow one — the P5000 and FirePro W5100 effectively trade blows in aggregate scoring, with the Quadro holding a modest lead. Both are professional workstation parts, so the comparison is apples-to-apples in driver philosophy and target workload.

Memory Subsystem

The Quadro P5000 pairs its GP104 core with 16 GB of GDDR5X memory on a 256-bit bus, yielding a bandwidth of 288.5 GB/s. Memory clock runs at 1127 MHz, which translates to 9 Gbps effective signaling. For a professional card of this era, the 16 GB capacity is the standout feature — it is double what many consumer cards of the same generation offered, and it directly targets workloads that need large datasets resident in VRAM. At high resolutions, the combination of a 256-bit bus and 288.5 GB/s bandwidth is adequate for demanding rendering and simulation tasks, though it does not match the wider buses found on higher-tier workstation parts. The 16 GB pool is the more important asset: textures, geometry buffers, and compute intermediates can stay local without spilling to system memory, which matters more than raw bandwidth for many professional applications. For users working with large point clouds, high-resolution textures, or multi-frame compositing, the capacity headroom is the difference between smooth interactivity and constant memory swapping. The GDDR5X type also gives the card a bandwidth advantage over older GDDR5-based workstation parts of similar capacity.

Ray Tracing and Feature Set

The P5000 has no dedicated RT cores and no tensor cores — both fields are null in the specification. This is a Pascal-generation card, so ray tracing acceleration is absent at the hardware level. API support includes DirectX 12 (12_1), OpenGL 4.6, and Vulkan 1.4, which means it can run modern graphics APIs and execute compute workloads through those interfaces, but any ray-traced effects must be handled by shader-based methods on the 2,560 shading units rather than dedicated hardware. The FP16 throughput is 138.6 GFLOPS, a 1:64 ratio relative to FP32, which indicates that half-precision compute is heavily de-emphasized — a clear sign this card was designed for FP32-centric professional workloads rather than machine learning or mixed-precision rendering. Display connectivity includes 1x DVI and 4x DisplayPort 1.4a, giving it solid multi-monitor capability for professional setups. The absence of tensor cores also means AI denoising and deep-learning super-sampling features are unavailable, so users must rely on traditional spatial and temporal denoising methods in their rendering pipelines.

Who Should Consider It

The benchmark data positions the P5000 as a mid-pack performer: the 52nd percentile across all GPUs means it sits squarely in the middle of the field. For professional users, the 16 GB VRAM and Pascal architecture make it a reasonable choice for high-resolution workloads that are memory-bound rather than compute-bound. The 8.873 TFLOPS of FP32 performance is respectable for its generation, but the card is now end-of-life and its successor is the Quadro Volta line. Users who need to run OpenGL 4.6 or Vulkan 1.4 applications with large texture sets will find the P5000 serviceable. However, the lack of RT and tensor cores means it is not suited for modern ray-traced rendering pipelines or AI-accelerated tasks. Gamers and content creators who need DirectX 12_1 features will find it capable in rasterized workloads, but the nearest rivals — including the RTX 3050 Ti Mobile — offer comparable or better aggregate performance in a more modern package. The Passmark DirectX 9 score of 170 and DirectX 10 score of 77 suggest legacy API performance is comparatively strong, while the DirectX 12 score of 44 indicates newer API workloads are less favorable. For CAD, simulation, and visualization workflows that rely on OpenGL, the card remains a viable option; for modern DX12 gaming or compute-heavy AI tasks, it is clearly out of its depth.

Benchmark Performance

The P5000's average benchmark score is 12,880, placing it at the 52nd percentile of all GPUs. Against its nearest rivals, the margins are tight. The AMD Radeon 740M scores 12,870, a 0.1% deficit to the Quadro — effectively a dead heat. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 scores 12,830, trailing by 0.4%. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Mobile scores 12,940, leading by 0.5%. The AMD FirePro W5100 scores 12,789, trailing by 0.7%. In synthetic terms, all four cards sit within a narrow performance band, making the P5000 statistically indistinguishable from its nearest competitors in aggregate scoring. Looking at individual benchmarks, the P5000 posts 52,636 in Geekbench OpenCL and 54,628 in Geekbench Vulkan, indicating solid compute throughput in both API families. The Passmark suite shows a more nuanced picture: G3D scores 12,634, G2D scores 674, and GPU Compute scores 6,508. The DirectX-specific Passmark results reveal a steep drop-off with newer APIs: 170 in DirectX 9, 77 in DirectX 10, 102 in DirectX 11, and just 44 in DirectX 12. This pattern suggests the card's architecture is much better optimized for older graphics APIs, and its DirectX 12 performance lags considerably behind what the API version number (12_1) might imply. The 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 1,330 is consistent with a mid-pack card in modern DX12 workloads. The contrast between the strong OpenCL and Vulkan results and the weak DX12 Passmark scores underscores that the P5000's driver and hardware were tuned for professional compute and OpenGL-centric applications rather than modern gaming APIs.

Power and Cooling

The Quadro P5000 carries a TDP of 180 W and requires a single 8-pin power connector. NVIDIA recommends a 450 W power supply, which is modest for a professional card of this class. The dual-slot cooler is sized for a 267 mm (10.5 inch) card, so it will fit in most full-tower and many mid-tower cases, but the 111 mm (4.4 inch) height should be checked against case clearance. The 16 nm TSMC process keeps power density manageable, and the 180 W TDP means a capable air cooler is sufficient — no exotic cooling required. The 1x 8-pin connector is a single, standard connection, and the 450 W PSU recommendation leaves headroom for a typical workstation CPU and peripherals. Given that the card is end-of-life, buyers should verify that their power supply has the appropriate 8-pin PCIe connector and that their case accommodates the dual-slot footprint. The 180 W TDP also means thermals are manageable in well-ventilated workstation chassis, and the card does not require the power delivery complexity of higher-end workstation GPUs.