nVidia heeft vandaag de Quadro (yup, die naam kwamen we al eerder tegen in de nVidia Win2k drivers) aangekondigd, een aangepaste versie van de GeForce bedoeld voor CAD en 3D modelling. Hier de bijna volledige press release:
NVIDIA creates discontinuity in workstation market with new Graphics Processing UnitNVIDIA Quadro Workstation GPU Radically Redefines Price/Performance for Design and Authoring Professionals
SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 1, 1999-- Leveraging over 500 man years of 3D expertise, NVIDIA(TM) Corporation today announced the Quadro(TM) workstation GPU, the newest member of the company's performance-leading family of award-winning graphics processors.
Based on NVIDIA's revolutionary single-chip integrated QuadEngine(TM) transform and lighting architecture, the Quadro is targeted for the digital content creation and MCAD design markets. Able to process more than 200 billion operations per second, the Quadro shatters the performance scores for entry-level and mid-range Windows NT® workstation markets. The Quadro delivers up to 17 million triangles per second and a texture fill rate of up to 540 million pixels per second.
In addition to delivering a breakthrough in performance, Quadro offers advanced features demanded by content creation professionals such as anti-aliased points and lines, two-sided lighting, front buffer 3D clipping and shared back-buffer support. NVIDIA Quadro-based products will ship with Intel®'s next-generation Pentium® III- and AMD Athlon(TM)-optimized OpenGL® drivers for Windows® 2000, Windows NT and Linux.
The NVIDIA Quadro workstation GPU will be offered in the new GLoria II professional graphics accelerator board from Elsa Inc. The GLoria II will allow engineers, animators and other creative professionals to achieve higher levels of real-time interactivity and image quality, thereby reducing overall design time and costs.
``Quadro is a critical element of our `top-to-bottom' strategy to offer a single architecture that spans the consumer to the workstation market. With Quadro, we are putting a powerful content creation platform in the hands of any 3D professional - not just those who can afford expensive workstations,'' said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO at NVIDIA. ``Our goal with Quadro is to enable content creators to quickly adopt breakthrough 3D features and capabilities. The broad availability of compelling and rich content will ultimately drive demand for our GPUs.''
``Our Quadro equipped ELSA GLoria II exceeds all expectations for real-world CAD P. and DCC applications. It clearly outperforms everything we see in today's professional 3D NT graphics space,'' stated Theo Beisch, President and CEO, ELSA AG.
Benchmark Information
Based on measurements with pre-release drivers on a 550 MHz Pentium III Xeon(TM) single-processor machine, NVIDIA Quadro delivers outstanding 2D and 3D performance compared to other high-end boards that cost as much as ten times more. For example, Quadro delivers a Viewperf Advanced Visualizer score of 74, compared to the more expensive Intense3D Wildcat 4000 score of 57 and 3Dlabs GVX1 score of 27. On industry standard application benchmarks like Gbench99 for Pro Engineer, Quadro posts a score of 84, compared to 77 for Intense3D Wildcat, and 78 for 3Dlabs GVX1. This equates to more than 5-times the price/performance of the Intense3D Wildcat. On other industry standard benchmarks like Indy3D, Quadro scores 38 on the Animation test, which measures the GPU's capability to replay data sets in real time.
``Maya customers in the film, video and game development markets are already buzzing about the Quadro GPU, and so are we -- the breakthrough price performance allows Maya to really strut its stuff on very affordable systems,'' said Bob Bennett, Maya Product Line Manager at Alias|wavefront.
