Nvidia today announced a new notebook Quadro video card, the Quadro M5500, designed for 3D content creators, media professionals, game and application developers. The Quadro M5500 incorporates a fully enabled GM204 and meets HTC and Oculus's hardware requirements. As a result this launch enables NVIDIA and their partners such as HP (NVIDIA VR Ready HP Z Workstation starts at $4,363) to sell VR-ready professional laptops alongside their existing consumer laptops.

The GPU is clocked at 1140MHz and it is paired with 8GB of GDDR5, clocked at 6.6Gbps. In terms of performance, the new M5500 should offer a better than 40% performance boost in shader or texture-bound scenarios, along with 32% more memory bandwidth, compared to the M5000M model.

However, Nvidia had to increased the TDP of the new M5500, which is 150W, a full 50% higher than the 100W TDP of the M5000M.

The company will be shipping the video card in May, and while a price has not been announced, expect it to be priced like a high-end professional mobile GPU.

Nvidia is also planning to bring VR support in the professional market.

The company and its partners will be extending its VR Ready program into the professional desktop market. Dell, Lenovo, HP, and other vendors will be shipping VR Ready certified workstations in the coming months. The minimum required here is the Quadro M5000 - NVIDIA's second-tier desktop Quadro card featuring a fully enabled GM204 GPU -while various Quadro M6000 configurations will offer additional power. For those applications that support VR SLI, at the top of the stack is the recently launched 24GB M6000 in SLI.