NVidia Unleashes New Quadros
Sharpen your mice CAD monkeys because nVidia has added a flagship and a spiffy yacht to its professional line of graphics cards.
The headliner, predictably called the Quadro FX 4500 (below), positively smacks down on former champ the FX 4400 with nVidia claiming it is nearly 50 per cent faster. It also has double the number of shader processing pipelines, support for SLI, 32x full scene anti-aliasing and the ability to connect up to four dual link high resolution displays simultaneously.
The basics come up to scratch too, with the PCI Express based card sporting a 256bit memory interface, unified 512MB of frame buffer memory, a 128bit floating point frame buffer (I hate it when technology messes with the flow of my sentences) and a purported graphics memory bandwidth of 33.6GBps.
Determined not to be outdone is the (relatively) more modest FX 3450. The little fella nips ahead of the FX 3400 to head up the midrange bracket and shows some pluck by also being SLI compatible as well as featuring 256MB of onboard RAM, a 256bit interface and an altogether impressive 32GBps of memory bandwidth. On top of this, the FX 3450 works with SLI Multi View, meaning two boards can be teamed up in a workstation to drive four high res displays.
Expect a whole bunch of third parties from Asus to XFX to put their own spins on these two, but – whatever you do – don’t expect them to be cheap… The FX 4400 currently retails at around £1,700, with the FX 3400 a pretty penny in and around the £950 mark.
The only solution to getting one is an all out assault. CAD Monkeys, Amass Outside The nVidia Labs. On My Mark…CHARGE!
)