Nvidia Quadro

The Nvidia Quadro series of AGP and PCI Express graphics-cards comes from the NVIDIA Corporation. Their designers aimed to accelerate CAD (Computer-Aided Design) and DCC (digital content creation), and the cards are usually featured in workstations. (Compared to the NVIDIA GeForce product-line, which specifically targets computer-gaming). Competing products include the FireGL line of workstation graphics cards by ATI Technologies, Inc.. Companies such as Matrox and Avid also focus on specialized hardware accelerated graphics cards intended primarily for DCC.

History

The Quadro line of GPU cards emerged in an effort at market segmentation by NVIDIA. In introducing the Quadro, NVIDIA were able to charge a premium for essentially the same graphics hardware in a different market. To differentiate their offerings, NVIDIA used driver software and firmware to enable features vital to segments of the workstation market; high performance anti-aliased lines and two-sided lighting were reserved for the Quadro product. In addition, improved support through a certified driver program was put in place. These features were of little value in the gaming markets that NVIDIA's products already sold to, but prevented high end customers from using the less expensive products. This practice continues even today although some products use higher capacity faster memory.

There are parallels between the market segmentation used to sell the Quadro line of products to Workstation (DCC) markets and the Tesla line of products to engineering and HPC markets.

In a settlement of a patent infringement lawsuit between SGI and NVIDIA, SGI acquired rights to speed binned NVIDIA graphics chips which they shipped under the VPro product label. These designs were completely separate from the SGI Odyssey based VPro products initially sold on their Irix workstations which used a completely different Bus.

Quadro Plex

Quadro Plex consists of a line of external servers for rendering videos. A Quadro Plex contains multiple Quadro FX video cards. A client computer connects to Quadro Plex (using PCI Express ×8 or ×16 interface card with interconnect cable) to initiate rendering.

Video cards

GeForce

Many of these cards use the same chipset as the game- and action-oriented GeForce video cards by NVIDIA. Those cards that are identical to the desktop cards can be software modified to identify themselves as the equivalent Quadro cards and this allows optimized drivers intended for the Quadro cards to be installed on the system.^[1] While this will not offer anywhere near the performance of the equivalent Quadro card,^{[citation needed]} it can improve performance in certain applications, but may require MAXtreme for the speed improvements.

The performance difference comes in the firmware controlling the card. Given the importance of speed in a game, a system used for gaming can shut down textures, shading, or rendering after only approximating a final output—in order to keep the overall frame rate high. The algorithms on a CAD-oriented card tend rather to complete all rendering operations, even if that introduces delays or variations in the timing, priortising accuracy and rendering quality over speed.

PCI Express

AGP

PCI

For business

The NVIDIA Quadro NVS graphics processing units (GPUs) provide business graphics solutions for manufacturers of small, medium, and enterprise-level business workstations. The NVIDIA Quadro NVS desktop solutions enable multi-display graphics for businesses such as financial traders.

Mobile applications

See also

• GeForce 8 series
• GeForce 9 series
• GeForce 200 Series
• GeForce 300 Series
• Comparison of Nvidia graphics processing units
• CUDA - Nvidia CUDA technology
• Nvidia Tesla - Nvidia's first dedicated general purpose GPU (graphics processing unit)
• Sun Visualization System - uses NVIDIA Quadro FX for 3D rendering and graphics acceleration
• ATI FireGL - ATI workstation graphics solution

References

External links

• NVIDIA.com - Quadro vs. GeForce GPUs Technical Brief
• NVIDIA.com - NVIDIA Quadro Plex
• Nvidia Nexus, NVIDIA.
• Plasma-online identify Nvidia chips page
• Rojakpot
• Meaker's Notebook graphics charts
• Quadro NVS Mobile - Tech Specs
• Comparison of mobile graphics cards
• Nvidia Quadro FX vs. ATI FirePro: Professional Graphics Accelerators Roundup