14 DAY TRIAL // Thinking it was time the professional graphics segment got an update, NVIDIA has formally launched a workstation graphics product line, all of them suited for medical, architectural, media, engineering and entertainment companies.
The Quadro K600 is the weakest, the so-called entry-level card, with 1 GB of onboard memory and a low-profile design.
The Quadro K2000 is the mainstream adapter, with 2 GB of memory and full-size PCB.
The third card is a variation of the K2000, called K2000D and equipped with two dual-link DVI display connectors. Good for high-end medical imaging displays.
Finally, the high-end video card is called Quadro K4000 and has 3 GB memory, plus stereo (single-slot configuration) and multi-monitor support.
"Our Kepler-based Quadro card driving the Premiere Pro Mercury Playback Engine blew away our Final Cut performance," said Anthony Safarik, editorial supervisor at Stargate Studios, an award-winning production company in South Pasadena, Calif.
"With the Quadro K5000 and Adobe Premiere Pro, we eliminated an hour of upfront rendering and another 20 minutes of rendering the linear effect on top of that. That's substantial time savings, especially when a roomful of producers, directors and visual effects supervisors are standing over your shoulder."
NVIDIA's new Quadro boards have NVIDIA FXAA (fast approximate anti-aliasing) and NVIDIA TXAA (temporal anti-aliasing) technologies, for movie-style image quality and realism.
They also get the NVIEW Desktop Management Software (productivity booster with multi-display setups, up to four monitors at one) and the NVIDIA Mosaic technology (combines up to 16 displays into a single, large one).
Finally, by using the NVIDIA Maximus technology, a Quadro board can be paired with an NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU card, for “scale-up computation.” The full range of NVIDIA Professional graphics solutions can be found here.
"With NVIDIA Kepler GPUs, we can create fully ray-trace rendered images of a bike before we actually build it," said Nick Schoeps, senior engineer at MotoCzysz, a Portland, Ore., engineering firm that designs, builds and races custom electric motorcycles.