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 only has a fill rate of 19.2bn texels per second, where-as the GeForce GTX 280 is 48.2bn texels per second, just for the sake of comparison.

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.