NVIDIA Vera

The DuckDB and NVIDIA teams
2026-09-15 | 2 min

We ran the full TPC-H benchmark with the scale factor 1,000 dataset using the duckdb-tpch project. Our setup included two server platforms: an x86 baseline (Intel Xeon 6) and NVIDIA Vera. We also compared two DuckDB versions: the latest stable version (v1.5.5) and the upcoming release's alpha version (v2.0.0-alpha), with the latter shipping several optimizations that make complex workloads such as TPC-H faster.

Platforms

x86 Baseline: Intel Xeon 6

We ran the benchmark on a server with an Intel Xeon 6 CPU.

  • CPU: Intel Xeon 6 CPU, 96 cores with hyper-threading
  • Memory: 768 GB
  • Disk: 1 NVMe SSD with 3 TB+ storage, formatted to ext4
  • Operating system: Ubuntu 26.04

DuckDB flags:

SET threads = 96;
SET block_allocator_memory = '500G';
SET allocator_background_threads = true;

NVIDIA Vera

We conducted the benchmark on a dual-socket system but restricted DuckDB to a single socket.

  • CPU: NVIDIA Vera CPU, 88 cores with Spatial Multithreading
  • Memory: 768 GB
  • Disk: 1 NVMe SSD with 3 TB+ storage, formatted to ext4
  • Operating system: Ubuntu 26.04

DuckDB flags:

SET threads = 88;
SET block_allocator_memory = '500G';
SET allocator_background_threads = true;

DuckDB Versions

We ran DuckDB using the Python client and benchmarked two DuckDB versions:

  • DuckDB v1.5.5
  • DuckDB v2.0.0-alpha (Python package: 1.6.0.dev379)

Benchmark Methodology

We performed an initial warmup run and discarded its result, then conducted three runs and took the median value of the QphH@SF composite scores.

Benchmark Results

  Setup 1 Setup 2 Setup 3 Setup 4
CPU Intel Intel Vera Vera
DuckDB 1.5.5 2.0.0-alpha 1.5.5 2.0.0-alpha
Run 1 1,643,610.87 2,120,588.82 2,488,209.48 3,073,292.99
Run 2 1,700,471.78 2,022,795.01 2,389,726.36 3,131,306.27
Run 3 1,673,422.48 2,109,782.19 2,482,589.73 3,052,102.87
Median score 1,673,422.48 2,109,782.19 2,482,589.73 3,073,292.99

The results show two key findings. First, the Vera platform has a 46–48% performance advantage on TPC-H SF1,000 over the x86 baseline (Xeon 6). Second, DuckDB v2.0.0-alpha shows a 24–26% improvement over DuckDB v1.5.5 on both CPUs – and this is something all users will benefit from once DuckDB v2.0.0 is out.

We'll share more details in an upcoming blog post. Stay tuned!

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