LOSTCIRCUITS

Summary

The high end workstation professional graphics market is undoubtedly dominated by nVidia. The original Quadro4 line of specialized OpenGL cards laid the groundwork for the later revisions based on the GeForce4 and, finally, the Quadro FX family of cards. Starting at a low of US$ 295.- or less street price and extending up to US$ 1,700.- at the high end, nVidia offers a match for anybody's needs.

The question is what are you really getting, and is it worth the extra money for a product that, like all other computer products has obsolescence already built in. As it turns out, obsolescence in the professional graphics market abides by different rules and time scales than the consumer graphics market with its 6 month turnover cycle. How else could it be that a one year old Quadro4 980 XGL can outperform the current top model, that is, the Quadro FX3000?

It's not quite like that, however, the point is that professional graphics cards are blessed with a substantially extended longevity, which arguably favors a more substantial investment for a higher-end solution. In any event, we have a good representation of today's mid and high-end contenders in the professional graphics scene that are up to a death match in the illustrious arena of professional high end OpenGL benchmarks.

The entire Quadro FX series has replaced the Quadro4 series, as the name suggests, the Quadro4 line of graphics cards had been based on an offshoot of the nVidia GeForce4 series whereas the Quadro FX family originates in the new GeForce FX series.

A street price of US$1700.- is naturally prohibitive for many interested clients. On the other hand, as we pointed out in earlier reviews, software licenses are orders of magnitude more expensive. Moreover, licensing oftentimes means that either a single copy of the application can be running at the time or else, that the licenses are time -limited, that is, renewals have to be paid on a monthly or even weekly basis. Time is money in in the professional graphics business and, therefore, depending on the application, a few hundred extra $ are peanuts compared to the savings that can be accomplished with a faster graphics card.

Bottomline is that more is sometimes less and that it depends on the environment, the workload and the type of application whether it is justified to purchase a more expensive card in order to save money or whether a lower priced unit will be a better fit.

Unfortunately, there is relatively little information available on the capabilities of these graphics cards, in fact, this is a rare case where highly specialized printed magazines are ahead of most of what is published by the online community. On the downside, many benchmarks used are proprietary and as such do not enjoy the benefit of the rather exhaustive auditing that is becoming a trademark of the online sites where nothing is taken for granted anymore, at least, with the better publications.

This, of course, leads to the same issues that we have faced with consumer products, optimizations are optimizations, cheats are cheats and inadequacies are inadequacies -- and somewhere in between is the truth that is often enough hard to find. Enough preamble, let's take a brief overview at the QuadroFX family first and then jump right into the FX3000.

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