The latest high-end NVIDIA card run through its paces.
CGSociety :: Hardware Review
9th December, by George Maestri
You always need more memory, more storage, and a better graphics card. That’s just one of those basic facts of life for anyone who works or plays with computers.
Graphics
After storage and memory, graphics is probably one of the most frequent upgrades performed to a computer. Most people look to the consumer sector for their upgrades, and the latest and greatest gaming card can usually give a system the extra boost it needs to work with images and play games. Those who create images and graphics for a living, however, need a lot more than just a fast gaming card. These people certainly need speed, but they also need stability and compatibility with a wide range of professional applications such as CAD, 3D modeling, simulation, and game design.
Professional class cards are typically a step above consumer cards in power and price. They are geared not only to be fast, but also handle very large data sets. While a gaming card may be great at creating cool explosion effects, and allow you to fly through a lushly textured scene at light speed, the requirements of a game is very different from those of a 3D professional.
GPU Architecture of the Quadro FX 4800.
These professional designers and engineers usually don’t need to move through scenes at light speed. Instead, they need to work with very large data sets. Architects have been known to load entire cities in a graphics card memory, while an automotive engineer may actually simulate a vehicle collision using the processing power of the graphics card.
“Raw speed is only one factor to consider,
the other big benefit to the Quadro FX 4800 is the additional 1GB of memory.”
Physical dimensions.
Buffer
Other important differences with gaming cards are a much larger frame buffers and a faster ability to read data out of the frame buffer, which helps those applications that need to use the GPU as a computing and simulation device. This large volume of data and GPU performance is where the professional cards outperform gaming cards. NVIDIA’s Quadro series of graphics cards have been at the forefront of this market for a number of years, and their new Quadro FX 4800 and 5800 cards set new standards for what is considered top of the line. We were delivered a Quadro FX4800 for review.
Physically, the Quadro FX 4800 is by no means small. It is double wide and almost full length. It needs a lot of room on the surrounding motherboard and adequate ventilation in the case. The circuit boards on the card are completely covered by a plastic cover that serves as a ventilation duct. This gives the card a nice finished look. At the far end of the card is a large fan, which thankfully runs fairly quiet. Power requirements are not too horrible, at 150W, it can still be fed by a single six pin connector, but it will need a beefy power supply.
The back of the card has one Dual-Link DVI connector along with two DisplayPort connectors. This marks the first NVIDIA card with these new connectors. For those who are not familiar with DisplayPort, this is the new digital monitor interface standard. Of these three ports, you can attach monitors to any two. One issue with being the first kid on the block with the new interface is that a lot of older and current monitors do not have DisplayPort connectors.
This can be resolved with an adapter cable. For those who need to connect to the world of broadcast video, and optional SDI card can be added for real time video compositing, such as in a broadcast news or weather application. For those syncing multiple displays, such as for video walls and venues, a G-Sync card can be configured to sync or Genlock cards to each other or an external source. For stereo applications, a stereo port is included on the back of the card.
The G-Sync card can sync or Genlock cards to an external source.
