Together with the VR Ready announcement, Nvidia unveiled the Quadro M5500 graphics card, a mobile GPU geared towards enabling VR-capable performance in mobile workstations.
The M5500 is Nvidia’s most powerful mobile graphics card (tied with the desktop-class GTX 980 found in some notebooks, except that this is a Quadro SKU), coming packed with 2048 CUDA cores. The Maxwell GPU is linked to 8 GB of GDDR5 memory over a 256-bit interface, which enables a 211 GB/s memory bandwidth running at 3.3 GHz (6.6 GHz effective). Performance for single floating point precision sits at 4.67 TFlops.
Nvidia would not provide standard clock speeds, stating that the M5500's clock is decided by the OEM implementing it. Naturally, that would depend on how much thermal headroom there is. Under ideal conditions, on full blast the M5500 can burn through 150 W, which is a huge power figure for any laptop to handle.
Nvidia said that it announced the M5500 to handle the demands of VR applications. In contrast to typical workstation or gaming needs, where Full HD at 30 frames per second is acceptable, in VR, the demands are much higher, with resolutions close to full HD per eye and both needing to run at more than 90 frames per second for a smooth experience.
Because you cannot buy the M5500 graphics card alone, pricing hasn’t been announced. Instead, it is up to the mobile workstation makers (like MSI) to decide. Given that this is Nvidia’s most powerful mobile graphics card, and a Quadro SKU to boot, it's going to have a premium price tag.
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