X-bit labs

Nvidia Quadro FX 5600 and Nvidia Quadro FX 4600: New Leaders in Professional Graphics

Category: Video

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 09/26/2007 | 09:24 AM ]

Today we are going to talk about those graphics solutions that are targeted not for games but for professional work. Our testlab received new Nvidia Quadro graphics solutions built on the company’s latest G80 GPU.

Table of contents:

• Who Needs Professional Graphics?
  
• Nvidia Quadro FX 4600
  
• Nvidia Quadro FX 5600
  
• Drivers
  
• Technical Specifications
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance
  
• SPECViewperf 10
  
• 3ds max 9
  
• Maya 8.5
  
• AutoCAD 2006
  
• 3DMark06
  
• Power Consumption
  
• Conclusion
  

Most articles you can find in the Video section of our website are one way or another connected with the gaming graphics solutions. Reviews of these products are of interest to majority of our readers in the first place. However, the graphics card market is not limited only by the new gaming products, of course.

There is another class of graphics accelerators, evolving in parallel to the gaming world, that are targeted for specialists and not hardcore gamers. These are the so-called professional solutions designed to be using in 3D modeling and automatic computer-aided design (CAD) platforms. We do not write very often about solutions like that: most professional do not base their decisions on the performance tests, they rather look at other criteria. For example, they trust the software developers’ recommendations, claimed supported features and even their own personal experience more than performance tests.

Nevertheless, we do our best not to forget about solutions like that and are proud to offer you detailed reviews of these products on a regular basis. Luckily, the new solutions do not come out very often in this field and the release of new models is often tied up to the new GPU architecture announcement.

This time our professional graphics cards discussion was provoked by the fact that relatively new Nvidia Quadro FX 5600 and Nvidia Quadro FX 4600 professional graphics accelerators, launched in March of 2007, finally became available in retail. These solutions, just like GeForce 8800 graphics card family, are based on chips with G80 graphics architecture with 128 streaming processors.

So, our today’s article will be devoted to the features and performance of these two professional products.