San Jose (CA) – Nvidia today announced what the company calls “most powerful professional graphics card in graphics history”, which may be true if 4 GB of memory is any indication of the capabilities of the device. While we do not know how capable this card is a real world scenario, we know that that it is one of the most expensive graphics cards ever sold.
The new Quadro FX 5800 comes with the 240 processors found in the Nvidia 200-series architecture and is the first graphics card that is equipped with 4 GB of GDDR3 memory. The memory bandwidth is a massive 102 GB/s. Nvidia says that the new card boasts a fill rate of more than 52 billion texels per second and offers a geometry performance of 300 million triangles per second. The power consumption is 189 watts, according to Nvidia.
All that performance does not come cheap: The suggested retail price will be $3499 and we would expect this card to sell for quite a bit more, just like its predecessor FX 5600 did. The FX 5600 still fetches about $2000 – and up to $7000 in versions tailored to broadcast applications. Even larger corporations and business that rely on high graphics performances may think twice whether the FX 5800 is worth $3500. However, in applications where memory bandwidth is essential, this may be just the case.
In such scenarios, you may be even interested in an even more capable system and Nvidia would be glad to help you out. The firms new 1U Quadro Plex 2200 S4 Visual Computing System, which targets oil and gas exploration, medical imaging and styling and design applications, comes with four Quadro FX 5800 GPUs and as you may guess, four times the core hardware features: 16 GB of memory and 960 processors. Nvidia says that the system can process 1.2 giga triangles per second.
The price of the Quadro Plex 2200 S4 VCS is slightly more than four Quadro FX 5800 cards: $14,995. The system will begin shipping in December, Nvidia said.
If you workstation graphics budget is not so much “Wall Street” but more “Main Street” (we wondered when this phrase would finally be picked up by PR people), Nvidia is offering the much cheaper Quadro NVS 450 card. $499 (MSRP) will buy a card that isn’t capable of pumping out a similar level of high-end graphics performance as the FX 5800, but is focused much more on standard business applications.
Running on just 35 watts, the NVS 450 has two GPUs with eight processors each, which is enough to power four 30” DisplayPort displays with a resolution of 2560x1600 pixels each, Nvidia said. The maximum resolution on four DVI-D displays is 1920x1200 each. The NVS 450 integrates 512 MB of memory (2x256 MB).