With NVIDIA having lost the number one spot in the high-performance consumer graphics card market, the Santa Clara, California-based chip maker is now concentrating its efforts on its professional business segment, with the Quadro lineup of graphic processors. The green company has just introduced two new products, specifically designed to meet the requirements of workstation desktop platforms, the Quadro FX 470, the first integrated professional motherboard GPU, and the Quadro FX 370 Low Profile (FX 370 LP), an entry-level graphics card part of NVIDIA's Quadro family of GPUs, designed for small form factor systems.

 

"In today's competitive global marketplace, engineers, traders, designers and power office users demand more functionality and reliability from their desktop computing solutions," said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional Services, NVIDIA. "The Quadro FX 470 and the Quadro FX 370 LP are precisely tested, certified and designed to maximize productivity and deliver the cost-effective, professional-quality solution these users require on a daily basis."

 

Both products released by NVIDIA have been featured with a 128-bit precision graphics pipeline, 32-bit floating point precision, filtering and blending, advanced color compression and early z-culling for improved bandwidth and rendering efficiency, and full-scene antialiasing. Also, the company's latest Quadro products include features such as Unified GPU Architecture, CUDA and Shader Model 4.0 Support, I/O scalability and performance, and NVIDIA's nView advanced display software.

 

The new Quadro FX motherboard GPU comes to support Intel's latest processors, including Pentium D, Pentium 4, Core 2 Quad, Core 2 Duo, Celeron D and Celeron. It provides 1 dual-link DVI, while the 4 memory DIMMs can support a maximum of 4GB of memory. The Quadro FX 370 Low Profile graphics card is featured with a total memory of 256MB, 8 CUDA Parallel processor cores and 8 GB/s.

 

Coming with a manufacturer's suggested retail price of US$149, the new low-profile Quadro FX 370 GPU appears to be the best high-performance graphics solution for low-cost professional workstation solutions. The Quadro 470 GPU motherboard has been set to come at an MSRP of US$700.