LOSTCIRCUITS

Professional graphics cards constitute a separate world by themselves. This is not only true for the price but also for the level of performance achieved by the latest and greatest cards out there. In the case of nVidia, there is an additional bonus play to be had, the Quadro's work in SLI configuration. We have a somewhat sporadic data base of professional cards that we tested over the last 3 years and that is by no means representative of everything that has been available. However, as the GPUs have evolved, so have the professional graphics applications and the demands on the graphics adapters. And once again, we are trying to put it all into perspective and answer all questions -- we'll see about the latter part, especially with respect to platforms, SLI width and operating systems.

And as usual, there were bugs, pulled out hair, carpal tunnel sydrom from wiggling the mouse in order to keep the performance up --- we are not kidding about that one. But wait, there is more ....

With all the ado about the evolution of consumer graphics, particularly gaming GPUs, it is easy to forget that the gaming sector is only one distinct part of the entire market. Arguably, nobody really pays too much attention to the evolutions also in the 2D desktop space, even though this particular area is still the one that is mostly used as the bread and butter of the computer industry. Suffice it to say that in the past decade, there have been some significant changes even in this wallflower industry.

The word Quadro on any graphics card has meant serious business for at least 1/2 dozen years.

Then there is the graphics market that centers primarily on video encoding and decoding, and is the stage for the battle between Avivo and PureVideo but that is not what we will be talking about today either. Rather, what we are going to cover is what happened in the world of professional graphics, formerly a playground of the FireGL and 3DLabs Wildcats but, as of lately, seriously in the hands of nVidia's Quadro line of graphics cards.

Aside from the potential lack of interest in very specialized, high end OpenGL professional graphics applications, there are other reasons why this particular market segment does not attract as much attention as the lineup in the gamer's world. Amongst those reasons is the price of these cards, a Quadro FX3000 was running some US$ 2000.- at introduction, prices later dropped to $ 1100 but even an "obsolete" specimen of this version still commands some $450 nowadays on ebay.

Disregarding the "budget" professional solutions, the prices in the high-end sector have stabilized around the US$ 2000.- price point. Current high-end contenders are the Creative Labs (after the acquisition of 3DLabs) Wildcat Realizm 800, featuring a whopping 640 MB of local frame buffer that can act as cache for system memory dedicated to texture storage and starting around US$ 1900.- Compared to this monster, ATI's FireGL V7100 is positioned comparatively low with a street price around US$ 930.- but - it only boasts 256 MB of graphics memory.

Just below the Creative Labs Widcat Realizm is the current flagship of nVidia's Quadro series, this time it is the Quadro FX 4500, based on the G70 architecture but with additional feature sets that are not disclosed by nVidia with a lowest street price around US$ 1800.-. Needless to say that in a world, where performance is more valuable than money, the additional possibility of running in SLI mode essentially doubles the value of the Quadros, even if nVidia only employs what 3DLabs used to describe as register combiners - as opposed to their "truly programmable" shaders. In reality, this statement is some 3 years old and only may have been true for the NV2x parts whereas the G70 architecture based GPUs do feature truly programmable shaders.

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