Nvidia unveils $3500 Quadro FX 5800

NOT ALL GRAPHICS CARDS are about the fun and games, and Nvidia’s new Quadro FX 5800 is a classic example. Aimed squarely at a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Digital Content Creation (DCC) crowd, the Quadro FX 5800 is one of the most powerful and expensive graphics cards ever made.

Offering up to 240 Cuda programmable parallel cores and a whopping 4GB of graphics memory, the card also comes complete with time lapse capable, interactive 4D modeling, big memory bandwidth reaching 102GB a second – almost 33 per cent more than the previous FX 5600 – and geometry performance of 300 million triangles per second.

Along with the above specs, the Quadro FX 5800 card also supports next-generation OpenGL and DirectX 10 apps as well as advanced multi-system and multi-device visualisation on Quadro G-Sync II.

So what does the new Quadro mean for games like Assassin’s Creed and FarCry2? Precisely nothing, because Quadros are not made with gamers in mind. But the FX 5800’s precision is a perfect fit for things like medical imaging, military flight simulation, oil and gas exploration and other intense CAD and DCC work.

And with true 10 bit colour reproduction – allowing for billions of colours - really high resolution imaging and rendering as well as extreme floating point calculations, industries like the military, oil and gas and scientific research, will no doubt be able to scrape together the suggested $3,500 retail price. µ