Nvidia has launched the Quadro FX 4800 professional graphics card, featuring 192 processor cores and 1.5 GB of memory.
Nvidia has been hard at work lately pushing out new high-end products for the professional market; last month releasing the Tesla personal supercomputer, as well as the world’s first 4 GB graphics card. While not quite as exciting as those releases however, Nvidia has started off December with the launch of its new Quadro FX 4800 ultra-high-end professional graphics card. The new graphics card features 192 CUDA parallel processor cores, 1.5 GB of GDDR3 frame buffer memory and 76.8 GB/s of memory bandwidth.
Designed for applications such as digital content creation and high-performance computational analysis, the Quadro FX 4800 seems to be the replacement for the aging Quadro FX 4600 graphics card, both of which are currently priced at $1,999. Loaded with 192 parallel processor cores though, the new Quadro FX 4800 has even more processor cores than the Quadro FX 5600, while having a lower price and requiring less power. According to benchmarks (opens in new tab) located on Nvidia’s website, the Quadro FX 5600 and Quadro FX 4800 perform identically.
| Processor Cores | Memory Size | Memory Bandwidth | Memory Interface | Power Consumption | Price | |
| Quadro FX 5800 | 240 | 4 GB | 102 GB/s | 512-bit | 189 W | $3,499 |
| Quadro FX 5600 (opens in new tab) | 128 | 1.5 GB | 76.8 GB/s | 384-bit | 171 W | $2,999 |
| Quadro FX 4800 | 192 | 1.5 GB | 76.8 GB/s | 384-bit | 150 W | $1,999 |
| Quadro FX 4600 (opens in new tab) | 112 | 768 GB | 67.2 GB/s | 384-bit | 134 W | $1,999 |
| Quadro FX 3700 (opens in new tab) | 112 | 512 MB | 51.2 GB/s | 256-bit | 78 W | $799 |
The Quadro FX 4800 comes equipped with two DisplayPort connectors, a single Dual-Link DVI connector and has support for DirectX 10, OpenGL 3.0 and Shader Model 4.0. The card fills up the space of two slots, consumes 150-watt of power and assuming that a system can handle two of these cards, there is support for SLI frame rendering.
