NVIDIA Introduces 4GB Quadro FX 5800

Looking to do some serious Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Digital Content Creation (DCC)? Then NVIDIA just released the power house of a card that might be for you. The Quadro FX 5800, dubbed by NVIDIA as the most powerful professional graphics card in history, features a massive 4GB of graphics memory and up to 102GB/s of memory bandwidth.

Other specs include TRUE 10-bit color – which enables billions of colors over the millions of ‘variations’ available by standard graphics cards, 240 CUDA Parallel Processor Cores, SLI Frame Rendering Support, Genlock/Framelock through Quadro G-Sync II and support for both Open GL and DirectX 10 applications.

Professionals searching for oil, diagnosing illness or styling the next high-performance luxury vehicle all have one thing in common, the need for advanced visual computing solutions. NVIDIA Corporation, the world leader in visual computing technologies, today unveiled the most powerful professional graphics card in graphics history - the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800.

"The size and complexity of data is growing at an exponential rate. The challenge for today's professional is to make sense of the mountain of data by distilling it into a form they can comprehend, analyze and use to make impactful decisions," said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional Solutions, NVIDIA. "At stake can be billions of investment dollars, or even people's lives. The Quadro FX 5800 has advanced features to allow massive
datasets to be viewed beyond traditional 3D enabling professionals to make fast and accurate decisions."

The Quadro FX 5800 graphics card offers unprecedented performance and scalability to rapidly visualize and interpret massive datasets that until now were unattainable on a workstation graphics board. Offering up to 240 CUDA programmable parallel cores and the industries first 4GB of graphics memory, the Quadro FX 5800 graphics card is ideally suited for oil and gas exploration, medical imaging, styling and design, and scientific visualization. Other advanced features of the Quadro FX 5800 graphics card include:

• Interactive 4D modeling with time lapse capabilities
• Massive memory bandwidth of up to 102 GB 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 multi-system and multi-device visualization environments with Quadro G-Sync II

"Landmark's recently launched GeoProbe R5000 software empowersgeoscientists with an unprecedented ability to visualize large-scale regional datasets at full resolution from a standard Linux workstation," said Nicholas Purday, manager of Geophysical Technologies at Landmark. "The NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800 graphics card has a more powerful GPU and superior triangle performance, which make it possible for the GeoProbe application to quickly render large surfaces, and allow us to move many computing-intensive processes to the graphics card, significantly enhancing the overall user experience." Landmark is an industry leading software and technology services brand of Halliburton, one of the world's largest providers of products and services to the energy industry.

"The advanced textured graphics capabilities of the Quadro FX 5800 are enabling CyberHeart to provide 3D radiosurgical target visualization and definition tools for the purpose of treating cardiac arrhythmias," said Thilaka Sumanaweera, CTO, CyberHeart. "Our applications are processing very large data sets acquired by the state-of-the-art 64-slice CT scanners using respiratory- and cardiac-gating. The Quadro FX cards provide us with the extreme bandwidth necessary to support our cutting-edge technology, and essentially, save lives." CyberHeart, Inc., is a medical device company developing a non-invasive radiosurgical system for cardiac applications.

The Quadro FX 5800 GPU features true 10-bit color enabling billions rather than millions of color variations for rich, vivid image quality with the broadest dynamic range. Professionals now benefit from viewing their models with higher degrees of precision and realism never before possible.

"Our customers are making important decisions about future products on the basis of RTT-powered 3D real-time models," said Ludwig Fuchs, cofounder and CEO of RTT. "The new Quadro FX 5800 will be the platform of choice to bring that arena to the next level. Higher levels of realism, physical correctness and large models are now made possible through a double number of cores and a generous frame buffer." Realtime Technology AG, is a leading supplier of real- time visualization technology and virtual prototyping solutions to the automotive, aerospace, industrial and consumer goods design industries.

Pricing for the Quadro FX 5800 is pricey at a whopping $3,499, but remember the Quadro’s cater to true color reproduction, extremely high resolution imaging and rendering and extreme floating point calculations. All the features most required in industries where precision rather than speed is of the highest importance, this is not nor was it ever meant to be a card for the average consumer.