NVIDIA and its professional graphics cards partners announced Wednesday the new Quadro FX 1100 solution to serve demanding graphics and engineering professionals in computer-aided design, digital content creation, and scientific visualization markets. The novelty will be actually available at a later date.

Based on the NV36 microarchitecture, also known as the GeForce FX 5700, the Quadro FX 5700 delivers higher performance in variety of industry-recognized benchmarks, such as proe-02, ugs-03 and 3dsmax-02 compared to the professional version of the GeForce FX 5800-powered NVIDIA Quadro FX 1000 product unveiled in the first quarter this year.

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 design boasts with 4 rendering pipelines, improved pixel and vertex shader processing engines, as well as some other architectural performance tweaks. Even though NV36’s architecture is a little bit more cost-effective compared to the GeForce FX 5800 GPU, the former delivers even higher performance than the latter, according to NVIDIA. Besides, Quadro FX 1100 is NVIDIA’s first professional graphics processor manufactured using IBM’s 0.13 micron fabrication process in IBM’s East Fishkill, New York, foundry.

The Quadro FX 1100 graphics cards provide 10.4GB/s peak memory bandwidth by utilising 650MHz 128-bit DDR SDRAM memory – moderately higher than the predecessor – the Quadro FX 1000. Core-clock of the Quadro FX 1100 was not announced at press time.

The newcomer will complement NVIDIA’s broad range of DirectX 9.0 supporting professional graphics solutions, namely, Quadro FX 500, Quadro FX 1000, Quadro FX 2000, Quadro FX 3000 and Quadro FX 3000G all shipping in volume now.

The Quadro FX 1100 will be available from IBM in its IntelliStation MPro and ZPro workstations as well as from HP in the HP Workstation xw4100, HP Workstation xw6000, and HP Workstation xw8000 early next year. Additionally, NVIDIA Quadro distributors such as PNY (USA and Europe), LeadTek (Asia/Pacific), and ELSA (Japan), as well as other value-added resellers and system builders will offer NVIDIA Quadro FX 1100-based products.

Pricing of NVIDIA Quadro FX 1100 products was not touched upon during the announcement.