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Its been a while since we have gotten
our hands on a new Nvidia professional level video card.
Last time we here at (tool.) tested the Elsa Gloria II
"Quadro", we were quit impressed with the performance
of that entry into the professional MCAD graphics card
arena. Elsa had always been a producer of high
quality gaming
cards in the day. It's too bad they left that market
space.
Let me first give you a
quick introduction to who we are here at (tool.).
tool. is a
Product Design and Development consultancy. We ideate,
design and engineer a variety of products in large segment
of industries. We basically think of new ways do build a better mousetrap. We use high end MCAD
solutions to develop our concepts. These high end
solutions require a great deal of CPU might and are very graphic intensive. We
are constantly updating and replacing our workstations with
the latest and greatest chip from either Intel or AMD. Most of this type of work used to be performed on
expensive Unix boxes that cost tens of thousands of
dollars. Today I can build a state of the art machine for
under eight hundred dollars. Product development is an
ever changing world where you either keep up with the
technology or lose your edge in the industry. Speed is a
crucial part of this job and in many cases with the type
of applications we use, the weakest link can be the machine
a designer or engineer is working on.
The applications used by
ourselves and many of the design consultancies range.
However, I
would have to say that a majority of today's top firms use a
combination of
Pro/ENGINEER,
Alias Wavefront and
SolidWorks. We here use all three to develop our concepts.
We use Alias to refine sketch concepts and render early
phase models and Pro/E and SolidWorks to completely engineer
assemblies and parts for production. Its the nature of
this industry to be at the cutting edge of computer and
graphic technology. In many cases we used these machines to design
either the computer itself or the machines used to handle
and produce the chips that go in them.
Enough of the career
pitch. Lets get down to the review.
In this round, we got the opportunity
to take a test drive with what Nvidia is pitching a the
"standard for professional graphics" and with some
exceptions, that did prove to be the
case here at (tool.) Here are the technical specs of this
new beast.
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Specifications
/ Features Of The PNY Quadro 4 900 XGL |
|
A GeForce 4 That
Is All Business |
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Technical Specifications
- Powered by NVIDIA®
Quadro4? 900 XGL
-
60 Million Triangles
Per Second
- 128-MB DDR SDRAM
- Lightspeed Memory
Architecture? II
- Dual nfiniteFX?
Vertex Shader -
programmable second generation effect processor - Resolution up to
2048 x 1536 at 75 Hz per display
- Flexible
multi-screen solution with full 3D support
- Dual monitor
connectors (DVI-I and DVI-I)
- Advanced desktop
management with
nView? technology - OpenGL stereo
connector for shutter glasses
- Unified Driver
Architecture optimized for
OpenGL and DirectX applications - Includes MAXtreme,
POWERDraft, and
Quadro4View software
Key
Features:
- Hardware overlay
planes
- Hardware
antialiased lines
- Two-sided lighting
- Full-scene
antialiasing
- 2nd-generation
occlusion culling
- LMA II
- 2048x1536 per
display
- nfiniteFX II
Engine
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Professional
Certifications
MCAD:
DCC:
-
Alias|Wavefront(TM)
Maya -
SOFTIMAGE®|XSI -
Discreet 3ds max(TM) -
Newtek Lightwave
3D(TM)
Operating
Systems
-
Windows® XP (WHQL
Certified) -
Windows® 2000 (WHQL
Certified) -
Windows NT® (WHQL
Certified)
| I must say the heat-sink
graphics are a nice touch. I can see Nvidia is taking a
few tips from the automotive industry by making the engine
compartment look appealing. Then there is the dual
DVI output, which can be a plus or a minus, depending on
your perspective. However, all in all it is an
impressive looking card from a hardware standpoint, with
it's tiny little BGA memory chips, placed strategically
around the GPU.
Setup
and
Drivers
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