Archrivals Nvidia Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) have more or less become the Coke and Pepsi of the computer graphics industry, and this week both companies have announced new lines of high-end graphics processing units (GPUs) designed for use in design workstations.

Nvidia Quadro P6000

Nvidia’s new product is the Quadro P6000, which the company claims can be used “to power the most advanced workstations ever built.”

“With its 3,840 cores and an amazing 12 TFlops of compute power, designers will be able to manipulate complex designs up to twice as fast as before,” Nvidia said in a press release.

The Quadro P6000 is built off of Nvidia’s new Pascal chip architecture, which is also the foundation of its newest consumer GPUs, the GeForce 1080, 1070, and 1060. Nvidia designed Pascal with virtual reality specifically in mind, and the company says that its new workstation GPU boasts powerful VR application development capabilities.

Of course, all of that power comes at a steep cost, and not just when it comes to the price tag, which has yet to be announced. The impressive specs of the Quadro P6000 require a whopping 250W of power, and the f0rm factor of the card itself is fairly large, measuring 4.4 inches high and 10.5 inches long. That means that if you want to be able to handle Nvidia’s new GPU, you will need both an impressive power supply unit and a fairly large computer case.

Then again, if you are spending hundreds of dollars on a workstation GPU, you probably have all of that figured out anyway.

Nvidia says that its new cards will be available this Fall.

Radeon Pro WX Series

AMD’s new line of workstation GPUs, called the Radeon Pro WX Series, includes three different cards that will come at different specifications and price points. The top line model, the Radeon Pro WX 7100, will be priced under $1,000, but so far AMD has yet to release an official price for any of its new GPUs.

AMD concedes that Nvidia’s cards may have the WX Series beat on sheer speed, but Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect, Radeon Technologies Group at AMD, told GamesBeat that AMD will remain ahead of Nvidia when it comes to performance per dollar.

“We have taken a long, hard look at the workstation space and chose to focus on what we define as ‘the art of the impossible.’ Radeon Pro represents a powerful alternative to the old way of doing things, setting aside proprietary solutions for open source ones, and closed ecosystems in favor of greater choice and flexibility,” Koduri said in a statement.

“When you invest in Radeon Pro, you’re not just investing in a product, but in a holistic approach to design and content creation. Radeon Pro gives our customers full control of their destinies, the opportunity to realize gains across the entire ecosystem, and the ability to create the ‘art of the impossible’ without proprietary tools dictating the way they practice your craft.”

Whether or not AMD’s cheaper price point will be worth the reduced specs remains to be seen, but looking at the consumer GPU market, there are still plenty of people willing to pay more even for the smallest performance improvements.

The new WX Series cards are set to release sometime before the end of the year.

Images courtesy of Nvidia Corp and AMD Inc