Nvidia Professional Graphics Products Range From Integrated To Incredible
November 5, 2008
Two phrases you never hear in the same sentence are workstation graphics and entry-level price. All right, we just used them in the same sentence, but Nvidia beat us to it: The graphics giant's Quadro FX 470 is the first motherboard professional graphics platform, while the Quadro FX 370 Low Profile is a card designed for fanless small-form-factor systems.
Certified for key digital content creation and computer-aided design applications, the new GPUs support Nvidia's CUDA parallel processing programming interface as well as OpenGL 2.1 and Shader Model 4.0. The FX 470 integrated chipset features 16 processing cores, dual-link DVI output, and a 128-bit memory interface with 12.8GB/sec of bandwidth addressing up to 4GB of memory. It's meant for systems priced under $700.
The FX 370 Low Profile card ($149) draws only 25 watts with no cooling fan. It has 8 processing cores plus 256MB of memory with a 64-bit, 8GB/sec interface.
At the far, far opposite end of the spectrum, Nvidia has introduced what it calls the most powerful professional graphics card in history, not to mention the first 4GB graphics card. The Quadro FX 5800 has 240 CUDA programmable parallel cores, memory bandwidth of up to 102GB/sec, and fill rates that exceed 52 billion texels per second with geometry performance of 300 million triangles per second.
The $3,499 two-slot monster lets professionals view models with degrees of precision and realism never before possible, with true 10-bit color enabling billions of color variations. Designed for styling and design, medical imaging, oil and gas exploration, and scientific visualization, the card includes DisplayPort and two dual-link DVI outputs.