NVIDIA® Quadro FX1800

For well over 18 months now the faithful NVIDIA® Quadro FX1700 has served many end-users at mid range level and this has been a very good selling card for NVIDIA® within the Tier 1's, S.I.'s and VAR's.   Like all professional cards a refresh comes along and enter the NVIDIA® Quadro FX1800.  This is an interesting card as the upgrade and update NVIDIA have put into place for the Quadro FX1800 have been significant indeed.     The charts below describe clearly the features and benefits that the end-user will gain from but the main key points of note are that of the huge memory bandwidth improvement and doubling of the CUDA cores now available.  We also see a significant increase in the actual onboard memory to 768MB of DDR3 which will be a welcome sight for those requiring that little bit extra when nearing the completion of those complex models.   Therefore pulling out the stops from all the usual professional applications and benchmarks we gave the Quadro FX1800 a good airing to see how it really did perform.

With the introduction complete we therefore look at what the card basic upgrades are:

Therefore the official line on the card from NVIDIA reads;   Create innovative designs with NVIDIA® Quadro® mid-range graphics solutions architected for engineering and design professionals. Quadro mid-range solutions are requested by the majority of manufacturing and design companies providing a balanced price and performance combination. Featuring the NVIDIA® CUDA™ parallel computing architecture, Quadro mid-range solutions set the standard for power efficiency while delivering a rich user experience

With these facts completed we therefore move onwards to the features and benefits of the card.  Some are well understood others we have left in place the explanation for you.

1. Advanced Colour Compression, Early Z-Cull

2. Compatible with Industry Standard Architecture   Compatible with x86 32 and 64-bit microprocessor architectures and operating systems from Intel/AMD and Microsoft/Linux

3. Cg High-Level Graphics Shader Language    Cg—“C” for graphics—is a high-level, open-standard programming language that takes advantage of the power of programmable GPUs. NVIDIA® Quadro® FX programmable graphics pipelines leverage high-level shading languages to enable the creation and integration of real-time photorealistic effects into 3D models, scenes, and designs. This represents a key enabler for the creation of real-time, photo-realistic visuals within CAD, DCC, and scientific applications.

4. Essential for Windows Vista

5. Full-Scene Antialiasing (FSAA)   Up to 16x FSAA dramatically reduces visual aliasing artifacts or “jaggies,” resulting in highly realistic scenes

6. Hardware 3D Window Clipping

7. HDMI Support

8. 8K Texture and Render Processing

9. Next-Generation Vertex and Pixel Programmability Shader Model 4.0

10. Next-Generation Vertex and Pixel Programmability

11. CUDA Architecture

12. NVIDIA® CUDA™ is a revolutionary parallel computing architecture for Quadro professional GPUs enabling breakthrough performance in areas such as video encoding, image processing, and accurate physics

13. NVIDIA Graphics API Extensions

14. NVIDIA High Precision High Dynamic Range (HDR) Technology

15. NVIDIA® PureVideo® HD Technology

16. NVIDIA GPU Unified Architecture

17. nView Multi-Display Technology

18. Quad Buffered Stereo

19. Dual DisplayPort Digital Display Connectors

20. Single Dual-Link Digital Display Connector   Dual-link TMDS transmitter supports ultra-high-resolution panels (up to 3840 x 2400 @24Hz) --which result in amazing image quality producing detailed photorealistic images.

21. Ultra quiet design

22. Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)

The NVIDIA® Quadro FX1800 has been now with us for a good 6 months, though as of yet there has not been much coverage of the card online.   Therefore with us being acquainted with the rudimentary basics of the card we  move onwards to the article and just how does this magical little black and green beastie perform.

First we take a look at the card in the flesh in the next page.

Page 1 - Introduction
Page 2 - Card Pictures
Page 3 - System Build, System Set-Up and Software Used
Page 4 - SiSoftware Sandra 2009 SP4 64-bit GPU/Video Tests
Page 5 - Bentley MicroStation Benchmark and POV-Ray Ver. 3.7 beta 34 64-bit
Page 6 - Cinebench 10 64-bit
Page 7 - Autodesk 3DS Max 2009 Scenes
Page 8 - SPECviewperf® 10 and SPECapc for SolidWorks 2007™
Page 9 - Conclusions and Award