Nvidia Launches Fermi-based Quadro GPUs

SIGGRAPH 2010, the annual computer graphics trade show of the ACM, started the exhibition Tuesday and Nvidia demonstrated at its booth its latest Quadro Fermi graphics cards. The cards are based on the same technology as the Nvidia GTX 400 series of consumer cards, but designed for workstation applications.

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The Quadro 6000, 5000 and 4000 have 448, 352 and 256 processing cores respectively, with graphics memory sizes of 6 GB, 2.5 GB and 2 GB. While having fewer processing cores than the highest-end GTX 400 series consumer card, they also have up to 4x more graphics memory available. On the mobile front, the Quadro 5000M has 320 processing cores and 2 GB of graphics memory. For truly high-performance GPU-based computing, there is the Quadro Plex 7000 with 896 processing cores and 12 GB of graphics memory. All of the cards are compliant with OpenGL 4.0/4.1, DirectX 11, and shader model 5.0.

Nvidia is projecting that these new cards will bring new levels of interactivity and GPU-based performance extensions to the workstation market. Things like ray-tracing, physics simulations and computational fluid dynamics calculations can be done on the GPU, freeing up the processor to focus on other operations.

Nvidia also introduced and demonstrated their new 3D Vision Pro shutter glasses, to assist in the creation of stereoscopic media and for stereoscopic visualization of medical and scientific data.

The Quadro 4000 and 5000 are available immediately, while the Quadro 6000 and Quadro Plex 7000 are expected to be available this fall. Mobile workstations from Dell and HP based on the Quadro 5000M are expected to be available in 3Q 2010.