INTRODUCTION
I had the incredible privilege to dive into the newest Nvidia Blackwell GPU for the last month. And I can safely say it is a considerable upgrade for motion picture, 2D, and 3D workflows providing huge productivity and efficiency gains.
Quick Tech Notes. The new GPU features a lot under the hood. 24064 CUDA Cores with fast 96GB of DDR7 RAM, 512bit Bus Width, 192/752 ROPs/TMUs, and a boost clock of 2617MHz. 3X the VRAM of the recent Blackwell RTX 5090 and 2X of the previous generation 6000 GPUs. And also to note, the thermal management and design has been revised for the better.
The new RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell is considerably more capable and powerful than previous generation Ada and Ampere 6000 series GPUs. In motion picture workflows improvements range from 1.7-4.3X faster for Transcodes over last generation. AI assisted Optical Flow is up to 10-14X faster. There are 4X NVENC and 4X NVDEC on board for accelerated 4:2:2 workflows with support for an extreme amount of streams. And perhaps most interestingly for 3D content creation the ability to load complex scenes that previously was not even possible on a single GPU.
This is one of the larger generational leaps in professional GPU hardware and it comes at a critical time when surrounding technologies are moving faster than ever. The Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell features improvements to the meaningful creative categories of efficiency, responsiveness in realtime interactivity, and expanding the capability on large complex projects.
I specialize in high resolution/high quality motion picture production and content creation in the entertainment industry. 4K, 8K, and beyond. The work I do tends to lean into the bleeding edge and I do rely a great deal on technology to allow me to explore where my vision and intention takes me. It has been a hot minute since I've been this excited and empowered by what a GPU can do for my workflows. This new generation of Blackwell workstation class GPUs has very real benefits to how fast and how big I can imagine.
PERFORMANCE BENCHMARKS AND NOTES
I'll keep this relatively brief quick read or we'll get lost in the graphs and spreadsheets. I've been testing the new GPU for several weeks and in three different systems.
A common workflow pipeline in the motion picture industry is transcoding RAW material to a Mezzanine codec. In this case I'll show the REDCODE RAW 8K and 6K material going to Apple ProRes as it's a fairly common task and both of those resolutions are highly relevant industry-wide in 2025. Exports achieved through REDCINE-X Pro. Test material captured on a RED V-Raptor [X] 8K VV body and I used REDCODE RAW HQ compression strength.
I'm comparing two things here. Firstly, I'm concerned at how export time compares to the realtime duration of the sequence, in this case 5 minutes at 24fps. Additionally I took to task and compared the new Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell against the previous two generations of 6000 series GPUs features Ada and Ampere architecture.
REDCODE RAW HQ 8K to ProRes via REDCINE-X Pro:
REDCODE RAW HQ 6K to ProRes via REDCINE-X Pro:
NEW 4:2:2 ACCELERATION
The RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell features 4X NVENC and 4X NVDEC to speed up 422 H.265 and H.264 material. A first from an Nvidia GPU. And the gains are notable, but difficult to document this early on.
Adobe provided me an early build of Premiere Pro to test out the new accelerated decode support for 4:2:2 on the timeline, accelerated encode support coming soon. I tested 8K, 6K, and 4K footage and found some very good playback and responsiveness. The other big note was I was able to have many streams of footage with no issues. This is critical for multi-cam productions as well as typical single camera based edits.
A workflow and data footprint related note regarding H.265 4:2:2 material in particular. Most are very used to using Mezzanine encoded Dailies and Proxies, but with 4:2:2 acceleration this may inspire using H.265 instead. Depending on your encoding method and strength, it can reduce your data footprint by 14-70X. This is nice for editing on the go using much smaller physical size media and smaller drive space.
We are early in this journey and we'll be seeing software companies adding and refining their support for the new features this GPU provides. That's actually something to be excited about as the results I'm seeing this early on are pretty great, but it will get better shortly.
AI ASSISTED RENDERING
Blackwell has some big AI acceleration under the hood and is another feature that speeds things up today and will likely be refined upon. Diving into Blackmagic Design's Davinci Resolve, I was able to notice a few things on the current release build that performed extradornarily well.
Resolve has various motion interpolation methods for for Retiming. Particularly heavy on a system is Optical flow and the various modes you can select. Using a 15 second clip expanded to 1 minute via slow motion, I tested them all. And shockingly I was seeing 10-15X the performance.
Other Neural Engine influenced tasks, like Super Resolution, didn't exactly do much different. But I suspect this will need some optimizing for Blackwell in particular. I will note I did have some interesting combinations of Noise Reduction plus Effects on some sequence tests and they were significantly faster. And in some cases for some of my test timlines and timelines resolutions, I was able to do more than I could before in terms of playback or even getting material to load or render.
3D and 2D NOTES
I'll start with 3D as I was curious to how Unreal and various 3D applications like Blender would benefit today. And the take away is significant as well. Very smooth when working in complex scenes. Unreal in particular can load gigantic projects with a single GPU, which is astonishing. This GPU will have a big impact on virtual stage productions once more people see it in action. Again, we'll see more gains as software updates come, but already there's big performance boosts when working in realtime as well as rendering
2D is a concern for me as work with high resolution still image sequences, still camera material, conceptual illustration, and matte paintings. I saw decent improvements across the board. Some of my array work and panoraman work yields very high resolution images that are very difficult to tackle. Beyond 16K resolution essentially. And things were moving smoothly in applications like Photoshop. Adobe Camera RAW can handle 400 megapixel images pretty well, but I also suspect we can get even better performance relatively soon.
WORKSTATION BUILD THOUGHTS
The Nvidia RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell is a very, very powerful GPU and inspires a few interesting thoughts. For many, a single GPU will likely handle nearly anything they throw at it. For others, like myself, a more common pathway is a dual GPU setup. The GPU draws 600W and can be easily configured with a modern single PSU to play nice on a 15-20 amp circuit. Some may find benefit for dual PSU systems depending on the hardware configuration. And yes, I think we'll see 4-6X builds and beyond with this GPU for those who need it. Thermals have been impressive for those used to the older style rear exhaust, but in my stress tests I hit no real walls in a well considered airflow setup.
I'll be personally building several systems with the new GPU. Two will be my traditional dual GPU configuration, but one build will be a smaller workstation suitable for travel work and likely using just one RTX PRO 6000. I have built rather small single and dual GPU configurations, but for on set work or travel work, I like the idea of maxing out the smallest build possible. And this will be a system that can handle a lot considering it's size.
NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 BLACKWELL WALLPAPERS & THANKS
A huge thank you to Nvidia for once again giving me the opportunity to have early access to an unnannouced GPU. Hopefully my tests and quick thoughts are useful to working professionals. I suspect most eyeballing this read already know the efficiency gains and time saves alone outside of the expanded capabilities of this GPU based on a few words and graphs. I clock my renders, transcodes, and simulations. The time save in a calendar year across projects is the biggest eye opener in being more productive while hitting the marks needed for high quality work.
One special bit before I sign off. A new architecture is a rare thing and I do respect the considerable work that goes into the tools I use to make my work. To moderately celebrate the occasion, I am providing several high resolution wallpapers of the Nvidia RTX PRO 6000 BLACKWELL. Feel free to use them on your desktop if you so desire.
