LOSTCIRCUITS

Professional graphics cards do not necessarily have to be at the very high end, on the contrary, even the lower end cards are more powerful in the specific applications they were designed for than even high end consumer cards. Therefore, before making any purchasing decision, it might be worth looking at the total repertoire of cards, as example, we have the current nVidia lineup with some representative benchmarks for each of the low-to-high end models.

nVidia's PCI Express Professional Graphics Product Lineup

* based on SPECviewperf® 8.1: for more information visit www.spec.org. Tested on 3.6 GHz Pentium® 4, Driver Release 77.32

Needless to say that it is also interesting to look at the technical specs in the context of the rest of the world, that is, how they line up in comparison to the current high-end graphics offerings in the consumer space.

The Quadro FX4500 features Dual DVI and Stereo synchronization ports.

Quadro FX4500 in Comparison

*,** The R580 core used in the RADEON X1900 XTX has 48 pixel shaders that are clearly different from the old understanding of a Pixel pipeline. In theory, at 650 MHz, the XTX core will be able to process 31.2 Gpixels/sec however, the 16 render back ends can output "only" 10.4 Gpixels/sec.

Within the current lineup of nVidia cards, the Quadro FX4500 are most comparable to the GeForce 7800GTX, at least with respect to the geometry clock (core clock), however, with a slower memory clock than the "commodity" card. On the other hand, just like the 7800 GTX-512, the Quadro 4500 features 512 MB, which is important for rendering very complex scenes. We have some examples of the impact of memory on the rendering speed later in this article. One thing to keep in mind through all these comparisons is the fact that the Quadro core is based on the same architecture as the GeForce but it has additional features that are lacking from the consumer level cards.

Detailed Specs

Next Page:    => Test System Configurations, Benchmark Overview =>