High End Video Cards

[llbbl]

NVIDIA Quadro FX is the really good. I have heard that it is the best on the market for Linux/Windows for visualization such as rendering CGI and HD video editing. Stick that into a AMD 64 FX Linux box and you should be good to go right? Well I'm not even sure if it is supported by Linux yet. They say that they have API's available but I haven't found a driver written for the card yet. It is certainly better than the ATI Radeon 9800 that comes with the Apple G5. ATI even has line of cards that is in competition with the Quadro's they are called FireGL's. Here is a dump on the specs for each brands.



All NVIDIA Quadro FX solutions feature the industry's only true 128-bit floating point precision graphics pipeline.


Quadro FX 3000
Memory Size
Memory Interface
Graphics Memory Bandwidth
proe-02
ugs-03
3dsmax-02 256MB
256-bit
27.2GB/sec.
42.0
45.3
27.1


Quadro FX 2000 Memory Size
Memory Interface
Graphics Memory Bandwidth
proe-02
ugs-03
3dsmax-02 128MB
128-bit
12.8GB/sec.
41.1
43.0
27.0


Quadro FX 1100 Memory Size
Memory Interface
Graphics Memory Bandwidth
proe-02
ugs-03
3dsmax-02 128MB
128-bit
10.4GB/sec.
37.9
36.5
26.9


Quadro FX 1000 Memory Size
Memory Interface
Graphics Memory Bandwidth
proe-02
ugs-03
3dsmax-02 128MB
128-bit
9.6GB/sec.
36.2
33.0
26.6


Quadro FX 500 Memory Size
Memory Interface
Graphics Memory Bandwidth
proe-02
ugs-03
3dsmax-02 128MB
128-bit
7.8GB/sec.
16.8
12.2

http://www.nvidia.com/page/quadrofx.html




FireGL
T2-128
128 MB DDR
128-bit
AGP 8X/4X
Geometry Engines:2
Pixel Pipelines:4
DVI-I + VGA
Triangles/Sec:200M
Vectors/Sec:36M
Pixels/Sec:1.6G

FireGL
Z1-128
128 MB DDR
256-bit
AGP 8X/4X
Geometry Engines:4
Pixel Pipelines:4
DVI-I + DVI-I
Triangles/Sec:300M
Vectors/Sec:49M
Pixels/Sec:1.3G

FireGL
X1-128
128 MB DDR
256-bit
AGP 8X/4X
Geometry Engines:4
Pixel Pipelines:8
DVI-I + DVI-I
Triangles/Sec:300M
Vectors/Sec:49M
Pixels/Sec:2.6G

FireGL
X1-256p
256 MB DDR
256-bit
AGP Pro 50
Geometry Engines:4
Pixel Pipelines:8
DVI-I + DVI-I
Triangles/Sec:300M
Vectors/Sec:49M
Pixels/Sec:2.6G

FireGL
X2-256t
256 MB DDR
256-bit
AGP 8X/4X
Geometry Engines:4
Pixel Pipelines:8
DVI-I + DVI-I
Triangles/Sec:412M
Vectors/Sec:65M
Pixels/Sec:3.3G



http://www.ati.com/products/workstation/fireglmatrix.html

[llbbl]

The NVIDIA page isn't very helpful. I need to find a better comparison of the two brands.

[llbbl]

Here is a good article.. The NVIDIA chip won out.

http://www.hothardware.com/hh_files/S&V/qfx2k_fireglx1.shtml


In our little round-up we've shown you here today, there are definitely some patterns that have developed and conclusions we can draw from the performance measurements we took in each of the benchmarks. First and foremost, it's obvious to see that the NVIDIA Quadro FX 2000 is a currently a considerably faster card than the ATi FireGL X1, as it was able to beat out the ATi card in every single test, with the exception of the Gaming Benchmarks and those are hardly all that meaningful for a Pro Graphics solution. Then their is the issue of driver optimizations for each of the specific Pro Graphics applications we tested. You see, unlike the Consumer Graphics space, application specific driver optimization is a openly discussed strategy that all major hardware OEMs practice. Additionally, since there are far fewer of these applications to support, versus the hundreds of thousands of PC Games on the market, it's much easier to support and continually optimize drivers for Pro Graphics applications and next generation graphics hardware architectures. And here is where clearly NVIDIA's product shines.