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November 12, 2008 5:01 AM PST

Nvidia unveils new professional graphics card

by Dong Ngo

(Credit: nVidia)

You think your SLI or CrossFire setup of the latest graphics card is powerful? Well, it might be. However, it's nothing compared to the single card that Nvidia introduced on Monday.

The Quadro FX 5800 is arguably the most powerful professional graphics card in the world...for now. Unfortunately, it's not a gaming card.

The new card works best for professionals searching for oil, diagnosing illness, or styling the next high-performance luxury vehicle, or anyone with the need for advanced visual-computing solutions.

The Quadro FX 5800 has 240 CUDA programmable parallel cores and features 4GB of graphics RAM. (To put this in perspective, a Windows 32-bit computer, like most computers out there, can address just a little more than 3.5GB of RAM). All this results in unprecedented performance and scalability. The Quadro FX 5800 is now able to visualize and interpret massive datasets that until now were unattainable on a workstation graphics board.

Other advanced features of the card include:

  • Interactive 4D modeling with time lapse capabilities

  • Massive memory bandwidth of up to 102GB per second

  • Fill rates that exceed 52 billion texels per second and geometry performance of 300 million triangles per second

  • Support for next-generation OpenGL and Microsoft DirectX 10 applications

  • Advanced multisystem and multidevice visualization environments with Quadro G-Sync II

With great power comes great...price. The new Quadro FX 5800 is estimated to cost about $3,500 and will be available shortly via third-party card makers.

Dong Ngo is a CNET editor who covers networking and network storage, and writes about anything else he finds interesting. You can also listen to his podcast at insidecnetlabs.cnet.com. E-mail Dong.
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by scythie November 12, 2008 6:31 AM PST
You can install drivers that will make "professional cards" run like your regular gaming cards.
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by laser21 November 12, 2008 7:55 AM PST
If this would support SLI, I would intantly buy 2 :-D
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by mmntech November 12, 2008 10:34 AM PST
These cards are intended for vary high resolution rendering (such as in medical imaging), which is why they have so much RAM. They're not ideal for gaming since they're tuned for rendering accuracy over frame rate. I figure this card is probably based on the Geforce GTX 280 GPU. You can buy two of those for under $1000 and run them in SLI with 2gb of RAM. That amount of memory is plenty for the resolutions gamers play at. Geforce cards can be modded (via firmware) to Quadros but that voids the warranty.
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by Masterofallz12 November 12, 2008 7:39 PM PST
Sooo... Is this the card that can handle Crysis?
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