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NVIDIA Unleashes Quadro4 700 Go GL. Welcome, NV28M!

by Anton Shilov
02/04/2003 | 03:29 PM

NVIDIA introduced the Quadro4 700 Go GL GPU that is designed for professional users who demand desktop performance, stability and quality for workstation graphics even on-the-go. NVIDIA said that Dell Computer already offers Precision M50 mobile workstation powered by the novelty.

The press release is full of PR and marketing stuff about everything in general and nothing in particular making it more complex to understand what is this Quadro4 700 Go GL is all about. NVIDIA’s web-site reveals us a number of different benchmark results of the Quadro4 700 Go GL and the Quadro4 500 Go GL on different systems. Only NVIDIA’s webmaster knows why they are needed on the web-site because they provide no information at all. Fortunately, there is a nice small document in the depths of NVIDIA’s web-site called Quadro4 700 Go GL Product Overview that tells us a bit more on the Quadro4 700 Go GL nature. In this tiny and smart white-paper, I learnt that the following features are supported:

Hardware overlay planes;
Hardware antialiased lines;
wo-sided lighting;
3D clipping planes;
8x high-resolution full-scene antialiasing;
NVIDIA nfiniteFX II Engine;
Second-generation occlusion culling;
NVIDIA Lightspeed Memory Architecture II;
Dual 350MHz RAMDACs (2048x1536 per display);
Optimized and certified for OpenGL and DirectX applications;
OpenGL quad-buffered stereo;
Video Processing Engine (VPE):
- Power-efficient MPEG2 decoder;
- Full-scene, full-speed HDTV/DVD playback (up to 1920x1080i ATSC format);
- Motion compensation and IDCT;
- Independent hardware color controls for video overlay;
- Hardware color-space conversion;
- 5-tap horizontal by 3-tap vertical filtering;
- 8:1 up/down scaling;
Full OpenGL 1.4 and DirectX 8.1 support.

A nice set of features presently unavailable on any professional graphics products for mobile computers! Pay attention, the newcomer apparently provides the nfiniteFX II Engine that is an exclusive feature of the GeForce Titanium (NV25 and NV28) graphics cores. As far as I remember, NVIDIA unveiled their NV28M chip back in November (see this news-story) and now they utilise this core in their new Quadro4 Go product. <%BANNER[article]%>

The Quadro4 Go 700 GL, according to the information we know about the GeForcre4 Go4200, provides the support for all the DirectX 8.1 features and should run at 200/400MHz for core and DDR SDRAM memory (NVIDIA, just as 3Dlabs does not like to disclose the clocks of their professional graphic solutions). The clock-rates are scalable and the chip, as well as the memory can run at very low frequencies in order to lower the power consumption. The Quadro4 Go 700 GL requires an additional chip called the “output chip modulator” to run notebook displays since none analogue or digital transmitters are integrated. The novelty also supports the AGP 8x, what is absolutely useless at the moment, since none of the mobile chipsets can offer AGP 3.0 these days. Needless to say that both Quadro4 Go 700 GL as well as the GeForce4 4200 Go are the fastest graphics solutions for notebooks currently.

So, the absolutely terrible and unattractive launch of a rather revolutionary product that is available now and should be about 1.5-2 times faster compared to the predecessor has just happened. Let us hope that this news-story makes the things clear for those, who were misled by the original PR stuff.

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