Introduction

The recent launch of the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 signalled the Santa Claran graphics company's intent to further increase their dominance in the professional graphics market. Their current generation unified graphics architecture is arguably the best fit for professional graphics they've ever produced, pairing a graphics core with prodigious shading and texturing ability with a memory controller that's more at ease with large framebuffer sizes than ever before.

Their load balanced shading core, which has no restrictions in terms of what thread types can occupy the shading resources and can run sampler threads in parallel with no shader resource dependency, is a good fit for the types of workloads professional graphics likes to throw at a GPU.

The entire shading core on the GPU can be tasked with vertex processing, with no wasted silicon sitting idle. Previous generations of Quadro hardware have been based on the same GPU technology as the consumer boards, which before G8-series designs has meant less of the chip dedicated to precious vertex shading than pixel shading, and thus more of the chip sitting idle during common professional workloads.

While you can plot a trend in certain pro-space app classes towards making more use of programmable shading hardware in the PC, especially when it comes to pixel shading, the ideal method to address any workload is hardware unification and load balancing, and that's what NVIDIA's latest architecture provides.

So it's no surprise to see them flesh out their Quadro range today with more G8-based products to compliment the ultra high-end FX 5600 and powerhouse FX 4600, both powered by G80. The basic architecture traits should let them increase performance over the Quadro models they'll eventually replace.

If you peek at the internals of the most recent NVIDIA display drivers, you can see references to the products NVIDIA are announcing today, for volume shipping in October. So without further ado, let's introduce Quadro NVS 290, Quadro FX 370, Quadro FX 570 and Quadro FX 1700.