Nvidia releases Quadro

GRAPHICS CHIP DESIGNER Nvidia has released details of its Quadro professional GPUs based on its Fermi architecture.

According to a statement, the mid-range Quadro 2000 has 192 Cuda processing cores and the entry-level Quadro 600 has 96 Cuda cores.

Nvidia claims that the Quadro 2000 can manage 1.5 times the geometry performance of the previous Quadro GPU. It uses the Green Goblin's Scalable Geometry Engine technology which can provide higher performance across leading CAD and DCC applications such as Solidworks and Autodesk 3ds Max. It also comes with certification from Solidworks to prove it.

At the entry-level the Quadro 600 is half-height and designed for applications such as Autodesk AutoCAD 2011. It can manage models that are twice the size and complexity of ordinary entry level chips. Nvidia claims.

Jeff Brown, general manager of professional solutions at Nvidia said both the Quadro 2000 and Quadro 600 feature 1GB of graphics memory and are compatible with Nvidia's 3D Vision Pro active shutter-glasses.

They both use OpenGL 4.1, DirectX 11, Shader Model 5.0, Directcompute and OpenCL, and the Cuda parallel computing architecture enables dramatic increases in computing performance. They each have 30-bit colour fidelity and can display of billions of colour variations for rich, vivid image quality with the broadest dynamic range, Nvidia enthuses.

Both are PCI Express 2.0 compliant, and feature an ultra-quiet design, with tailored acoustics for an ultra-quiet desktop environment. They also use the outfit's Mosaic Technology, which will enable any application to use one or more Quadro professional graphics cards to scale across up to eight high-resolution displays.

The Quadro 2000 will hit the reseller shelves at £369 while the Quadro 600 will sell for £139. They should be out in the shops now. µ