Nvidia Graphics Accelerators

Quadro FX 570

Although contemporary professional graphics accelerators from Nvidia start from Quadro FX 370 we decided not to review this card today. For the price of $120 it offers very low performance and cannot compete successfully against the youngest competitor’s solutions. That is why the slowest professional graphics accelerator from Nvidia participating in our today’s roundup will be Quadro FX 570. It sells for only $60 more - $180 – but its GPU works at higher frequency and its memory bus is twice as wide.

Quadro FX 570 (just like Quadro FX 370) is based on G84GL chip manufactured with 80nm technological process. We can’t say that it belongs to the most progressive Nvidia GPU generation, because they already have 65nm chips at their disposal. However, this GPU supports DirectX 10, Shader Model 4.0 and OpenGL 2.1, so it is still quite up-to-date.

On the gaming side, GeForce 860 graphics cards use the same chip, however, there is no complete analogue to Quadro FX 570 in the gaming camp. The thing is that the GPU of this professional graphics accelerator works at a surprisingly low frequency of only 460MHz (the shader domain frequency equals 920MHz). Besides, it only has half the shaders – 16. And since the GPU has 8 rasterizers, Quadro FX 570 theoretical fillrate makes 3.7GPixel/s.

Since technical specifications of Quadro FX 570 solution are not like those of any Nvidia’s gamin cards, we were not surprised to discover that its features a unique PCB layout. The card looks like a budget solution: it is small, has very simple layout, has no additional power supply connector, a small chip cooler with an aluminum heatsink.

Quadro FX 570 features 256MB of graphics memory. It has the same amount of memory as the professional budget solution from AMD has. Nvidia card uses the same DDR2 SDRAM chips and 128bit memory bus, however, its memory works at lower frequency of 800MHz. As a result, the memory bus bandwidth of this Nvidia solution equals only 12.8GB/s.

The card uses PCI Express x16 v2.0 bus and is equipped with two Dual-Link DVI Outs for monitors with 2560x1600 maximum resolution.