NVIDIA on Monday established a new flagship video card for its workstation line. The Quadro FX 5800 is a major improvement over the earlier 5600 that brings 240 visual effects cores, or nearly double the old model's 128, but stands out as the first-ever video card with 4GB of onboard memory. The capacity allows for extremely large textures and geometry and also enables apps with CUDA general-purpose computing support to feed very large data sets: 4D modeling that factors in time is now more realistic.

Performance accordingly goes up as a whole, according to NVIDIA. Memory bandwidth climbs from 76.8GB per second to 102GB and lets the card reach its peak 52 billion textured pixels per second fill rate as well as raw geometry performance of 300 million triangles per second.

The system continues to support DirectX 10 and OpenGL and also supports NVIDIA's G-Sync II feature, which lets multiple systems render the same final image. The company is launching the card for $3,499 and will make it available both through computer builders as well as card makers like Elsa, Leadtek and PNY.