Update: Read our follow-up article, “What is NVidia Really Releasing?“.
NVidia has issued a press release announcing a new line of QuadroFX cards.
- NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800 – the industry’s first and only 4GB, ultra high-end solution delivers the highest visualization performance and capabilities, enabling professionals to work with large-scale models and datasets.
- NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 – ultra high-end solution provides professionals with the most complete toolset to dramatically push the boundaries of realism, performance, and quality.
- NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800 – single slot solution with a robust feature set and added capabilities such as SLI Multi-OS and SDI support to enable a no-compromise, high-performance, interactive visualization experience.
- NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800 – mid-range solution offers the best price performance for workstation graphics and provides the optimal blend of quality, precision, performance, and programmability.
- NVIDIA Quadro FX 580 – best-in-class entry-level solution boosts productivity for a variety of industry-leading volume CAD and digital content applications.
- NVIDIA Quadro FX 380 – an affordable professional-class graphics solution extends energy efficiency while delivering 50-percent faster performance.
- The Quadro NVS 295 – capable of supporting up to two 30-inch digital displays at maximum resolutions, taking business graphics to a new level visual perfection.
Another interesting piece of this is their new “SLI Multi-OS” system.
Built into the new Quadro FX 3800, Quadro FX 4800, and Quadro FX 5800, SLI Multi-OS allows users to tap into the advanced visualization and compute capabilities of the Quadro GPUs to experience full graphics performance within a virtualized system. SLI Multi-OS works in association with Parallels Workstation Extreme virtualization software and Intel’s VT-d technology, assigning both the host and guest virtual machine its own dedicated GPU. Available in the new HP Z800 workstation, the combination of these innovative technologies delivers application performance nearly identical to systems configured with a dedicated operating system and GPU.
This means you can now run OpenGL applications with full hardware acceleration inside a Virtualized environment. With virtualization becoming more and more attractive to larger organizations, and virtualization being used more on cluster-configurations to simulate one single large machine across a cluster of smaller machines, a good working virtualized OpenGL accelerator will be a huge win for NVidia in the upcoming thin-client space created by companies like OnLive & Gaikai
via NVidia Press Releases: SLI Multi OS and new QuadroFX’s.
What is NVidia announcing today?
Certainly it is not the Quadro FX 5800 with 4GB of video ram on-board. That was announced on November 10, 2008.
http://news.prnewswire.com/DisplayReleaseContent.aspx?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/11-10-2008/0004921461&EDATE=
Certainly it is not the Quadro FX 4800. That was announced on December 18, 2008.
http://news.prnewswire.com/DisplayReleaseContent.aspx?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/12-19-2008/0004945322&EDATE=
So really it appears that the new cards are the NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800, NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800, and the NVIDIA Quadro FX 580/380.
The Quadro FX 3800 should sell for between $900 to $1200. This card has 1GB GDDR3 memory, 192 shader processors, 256-bit memory bus, and 51.2GB/s memory bandwidth. The maximum power consumption is about 107 watts.
The Quadro FX 1800 should sell for about $600. This card has 768 MB GDDR3 memory, 64 shader processors, 192-bit memory bus, and 38.4GB/s memory bandwidth. The maximum power consumption is about 59 watts. It is based on the G94 core (a.k.a. the GeForce 9600).
The Quadro FX 580 should sell for about $150. This card has 512 MB GDDR3 memory, 32 shader processors, 128-bit memory bus, and 25.6GB/s memory bandwidth. The maximum power consumption is about 40 watts. It is based on the G96 core (a.k.a. the GeForce 9500).
At the low end you have the Quadro FX 380 with 256 MB of memory, and 22.4 GB/s memory bandwidth. That is, it is a Quadro FX 580 with slower clocks and less memory. It is based on the G96 core (a.k.a. the GeForce 9500).
The Quadro NVS 295 is really multi-display graphics for businesses.
In other words, even these new cards are nothing really new. The only new thing that I can see is the SLI Multi-OS. Now that is worth paying attention to.