Its been many months here since we last have seen an NVIDIA Quadro®, firing through the door in rapid succession has been ATI's FireGL® and FirePro® cards which have taken an unprecedented lead within the professional graphic card arena in many areas.    Therefore when we learned a few months back that the Quadro FX4800 was on its way many interested eyes opened here as too the formidable question - is NVIDIA® going to regain the illusive Diamond Studded Crown?

On paper this looks to be one mighty beast, bulging in with 1.5GB of memory and a very cleverly clocked GPU and DDR3 memory.  Most importantly supporting the new 55nm core process or for some the GT200GL supporting some 1.4Billion transistors, so this should in actual theory see some massive improvements upon it predecessor the Quadro® FX4600 with the clever implementation of it's 192 CUDA processing cores.  

A snip from NVIDIA's PR on the Quadro® FX reference CUDA;  All Quadro® FX GPU’s include a substantial portion of die area dedicated to processing, unlike CPUs where a majority of die area is dedicated to onboard cache memory. Rough estimates show 20% of the transistors of a CPU are dedicated to computation, compared to 80% of GPU transistors. GPU processing is centered on computation and throughput, where CPUs focus heavily on reducing latency and keeping their pipelines busy (high cache hit rates and efficient branch prediction).

Therefore the obvious target market for this Ultra High End professional graphic's card; geophysicists, designers, scientists, engineers, Medical Imagery and other technical professionals demanding nothing but the best out from their workstations.

But before we move any further forward lets have a swift look at what the card actually has to offer these demanding end users.

*   30-bit Colour Support.   With integrated support for 30-bit colour (10-bit colour per colour channel) over DisplayPort the Quadro® FX 5800/4800 boards offer new levels of colour fidelity. Instead of the traditional 16.7 million discrete colours which are supported by 24-bit colour monitors, the Quadro® FX 5800/4800 can take advantage of 30-bit display monitors to display 1.7 billion colours simultaneously.   The new Hewlett-Packard DreamColor® LP2480zx Professional Display supports 30-bit colour. With 64x the available colour values available, 30-bit colour support eliminates banding issues, and provides graphics professionals with unmatched colour accuracy and tonal response.

Page 1 - Introduction
Page 2 - Introduction Continued
Page 3 - Pictures
Page 4 - Pictures Continued
Page 5 - Test Systems and Software Used (32-bit & 64-bit modes)
Page 6 - MAXON CINEBENCH 10 and Bentley MicroStation V8 XM Graphics Benchmark
Page 7 - Autodesk 3ds Max 9 SP2 Scenes
Page 8 - SPECapc for SolidWorks 2007™ and SPECviewperf 10 ® (32-bit)
Page 9 - MAXON CINEBENCH 10 and SPECviewperf 10 ® (32-bit)
Page 10 - Conclusions