It had been some time since NVIDIA introduced any ultrahigh-end graphics cards, but earlier this year the company announced two additions to the Quadro
family. Cadalyst received the first of these new cards to review here. I hope to evaluate the second new model, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600, in the near future.
The Quadro FX 4600 is a PCIe 16x workstation-level graphics card with 768MB of onboard GDDR3 memory. In a radical departure from previous Quadro graphics cards, the FX 4600 (and the FX 5600) are based on the G80 series of GPUs (graphics processing units), similar to an architecture used in the latest NVIDIA line of consumer-grade cards, including the GeForce 8800 GTS and GTX. In the new workstation versions, the graphics cards are enhanced to support the needs of professional users. This move affords NVIDIA support for DirectX 10 on the new Microsoft Vista operating platform and offers a unified shader architecture that also benefits OpenGL and legacy DX 9 applications.
family. Cadalyst received the first of these new cards to review here. I hope to evaluate the second new model, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600, in the near future.
The Quadro FX 4600 is a PCIe 16x workstation-level graphics card with 768MB of onboard GDDR3 memory. In a radical departure from previous Quadro graphics cards, the FX 4600 (and the FX 5600) are based on the G80 series of GPUs (graphics processing units), similar to an architecture used in the latest NVIDIA line of consumer-grade cards, including the GeForce 8800 GTS and GTX. In the new workstation versions, the graphics cards are enhanced to support the needs of professional users. This move affords NVIDIA support for DirectX 10 on the new Microsoft Vista operating platform and offers a unified shader architecture that also benefits OpenGL and legacy DX 9 applications.
The FX 4600 supports OpenGL 2.1 and has 20 new OpenGL extensions. Additionally, the new Quadros support high-bandwidth digital content protection (HDCP) for playing back protected content. NVIDIA POWERdraft for AutoCAD and NVIDIA MAXtreme for Autodesk 3ds Max are supported for those who use these design applications. Among the many extras for the professional-level Quadro FX 4600 are extensive application certifications
We tested the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4600 on an Xi MTower PCIe from @Xi Computer, which was based on an Intel Core2 X6800 2.93GHz processor that was overclocked to 3.47GHz and water cooled. The system had 2GB of RAM installed, and testing was done with NVIDIA prerelease drivers v.6.14.10.9772 (01/29/07) that had incorporated the configuration files for the new Quadro card. We changed our benchmark test procedure slightly for this review, as noted below.
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