NVIDIA today brought its Fermi graphics architecture to the Mac at last by launching the Quadro 4000 for Mac. The workstation-class video supports the same features as its Windows counterpart and focuses heavily on general-purpose computing. It gives a lift to OpenCL in Snow Leopard and can greatly accelerate apps that are using NVIDIA's own CUDA language as well, such as video processing in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.
NVIDIA today brought its current-generation Fermi graphics to less expensive workstation cards through two models, the Quadro 2000 and Quadro 600. The two have been pared back to 192 cores and 96 cores respectively but promise more performance than the parts they replace. The Quadro 2000 is said to be about 50 percent faster in geometry rendering than the FX 1800 it replaces, while the Quadro 600 is about twice as capable as earlier starter workstation cards.
NVIDIA on Tuesday switched focus to its highest-end workstation cards with the unveiling of the Quadro FX 4800. The chipset is based on the same architecture as the GeForce GTX 260 and carries 192 programmable shader cores but is tuned for 3D modeling and other pro apps: it carries a full 1.5GB of memory for higher-detailed models and textures, supports 30-bit color output and allows 32X full-scene antialiasing. The 4800 is roughly twice as fast as previous cards, the company claims.
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.
