Nvidia Unveils New Quadro FX 5800
Not playing games, but rather, doing some seriously intense CAD or DCC work? Medical Imaging? Nvidia has just unveiled its latest addition to the Quadro line of cards with the FX 5800 – claiming the world’s most powerful graphics card – outside of playing games.
First off, the Quadro FX line of cards have not, are not, and will not, ever be meant for gaming – graphics cards intended for gaming require extremely high ‘fill rates’ – something the Quadro cards do not excel in at all, since it is a feature their application does not require.
The Quadro FX cards are design to target the Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Digital Content Creation (DCC) audience. CAD and DCC applications do not require the insane ‘fill rate’ capabilities of the GeForce line of graphics cards, targeted at consume video games. The Quadro’s cater to true color reproduction, extremely high resolution imaging and rendering, extreme floating point calculations, the list goes on. All the features most required in industries where precision rather than speed is of the highest importance.
With that being said – NO, this card will not play Crysis or Far Cry 2 any better than what you currently have, it will actually play it worse.
The new Quadro FX 5800 offers 102GB/second of memory bandwidth, that is just shy of 33 percent MORE than the previous model FX 5600, TRUE 10-bit color – which enables billions of colors over the millions of ‘variations’ available by standard graphics cards. The FX 5800 has a fill rate of 52bn texels per second.
Expected entry pricing for the Quadro FX 5800 starts at US$3499.00 – a price that melts the minds of most consumers and enthusiast system builders – however, this price is definitely affordable when looked at by the people that actually need its functions.
More information can be obtained on Nvidia’s web page for the Quadro FX 5800.
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The_Blood_Raven Yeah, Thanks for being so thorough about explaining that it is NOT a gaming card. I remember some guy bought a Nvidia Quadro FX 5500 and then wondered why games were a slideshow... $5k down the drain.Reply -
resonance451 It's sad that the article is so heavily geared toward shutting up the idiot pseudo-prosumer. I'd rather read more about the actual card and let the morons spend 30 seconds on Google to find out the difference between Crysis and CAD.Reply -
wavebossa @BloodRaven,Reply
I kinda feel for that guy because Nvidia made a Geforce fx 5500 and a Quadro fx 5500.
Proof that the naming scheme does mess people up... but the pricetag should have been the giveaway. -
I've been rustling cows since 1985. Of course, back then, we didn't have anything like this. Now, I have tons of these. Worth every penny. Party on, dudes!Reply
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Tindytim Pfft. All workstation cards are the same as their consumer counterparts with a few differences in ports, and more RAM. What you're actually paying for is the amount of support for drivers, and the various applications.Reply
You can mod the BIOS of a GeForce card to work with the Drivers for the Quadro card based upon it.
Although it would be interesting to mod the other way, so you'd get a gaming card with 4GB of VRAM. -
You can definitely game on a quadro. It wouldn't be quite as good as an equivalent GeForce, but it's not bad either. I've used the Quadro FX4600s in the CAD lab at school for gaming. They'll play CoD4 on pretty good settings (mostly limited by the 2ghz DC Xeon) at 1280x1024.Reply
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If the cards spec's are high enough you should be able to play crysis no problem at all because workstation and gaming cards are the same pretty much except in regards to they make you pay a way higher price and slap the label of workstation on them. anyone who disagrees with the fact that a workstation card can play games if it has the right spec's is full of shiitake mushrooms and doesnt know what they are talking about. flamers flame me all you want. I know what the true facts of the matter are so i dont really care what you think or say.Reply