Professional Graphics Cards are
sort of an oddity to us here at HotHardware.com.
Admittedly, we don't get to tinker enough in this area,
since frankly the market that is served by these products is
a specialty niche´, where there just isn't the same level of
marketing buzz, as in the Consumer Graphics space. Not
too mention, the fact that if you want to fairly represent a
product's performance and features, from our perspective,
one needs to look at a number of different application
scenarios. The high end CAD and 3D design and
rendering applications, as well as the benchmarks to go with
them, that are required for proper measurement and analysis,
are also not nearly as common place as firing up Quake 3 and
running a time demo. Regardless, we occasionally like
to offer a first hand look at what's new in Pro Graphics
each year and certainly there have been many new products to
hit the market over the past few months.
However, again
since we deal so often in Consumer Graphics, Pro Graphics
cards and the price points they carry are still a bit
foreign to us. Why is it that both products we'll be
looking at today, the ATi FireGL X1 and NVIDIA Quadro FX
2000, share nearly identical hardware with their consumer
counterparts, yet cost 3 to 5 times as much? The
answer goes back to those highly specialized applications
again, and optimizing the hardware and drivers to accelerate
performance to the best of the core Graphics Processor's
ability. Additionally, each major tools suite, like
SolidWorks for example, has it's own set of "certification"
criteria if hardware vendors like ATi or NVIDIA want to have
full support for their product, back through the tools
vendor. Just imagine large Corporate IT Professionals
outfitting their CAD Labs with hardware that is not
"officially" supported by their most important design tool
suite? Well you get the idea. This isn't a game
of Quake we're talking here, this is corporate sales and
there's a whole new meaning to the word "support" at this
level.
In this article
we'll be showcasing the first round offerings of next
generation Pro Graphics products from ATi and NVIDIA, the
ATi FireGL X1 and the NVIDIA Quadro FX 2000. Very
recently, the FireGL X2 was announced, as well as the Quadro
FX 3000. We'll be covering those products in future
articles but for now lets see how an NV30GL GPU and a
FGL9700 VPU match up head to head.
Features And Specs
A
Tale Of Two Pro Graphics Titans
Click Any Image
For Full View
ATI FireGL X1
Features and Specs
R300 Visual Processing Unit (VPU)
Core Clock Speed: 325MHz
128MB of DDR RAM
620MHz DDR Effective
Speed
256-bit Memory Interface
8-pixel pipeline
architecture providing high performance,
parallel rendering capabilities
24-bit for each color
component (RGBA) enables true-life images to be
displayed beyond 16.7M colors
Full scene anti-aliasing
Dual DVI-I connectors
support any combination of digital flat panel
and VGA displays
AGP 4X/8X support
Optimized drivers certified
for the leading CAD and DCC software
applications
Full support for the latest
OpenGL® API and Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0
Hardware accelerated
rendering using OpenGL Shading Language and
DirectX 9 HLSL
Specifications
? Powered by the FGL? 9700 Visual Processing
Unit (VPU)
? 256-bit high bandwidth memory architecture
? 4 parallel geometry engines
? 8 parallel pixel pipelines
? 128-bit full floating point precision
? 24-bits per RGBA component displays beyond
16.7M colors
? Dual DVI-I supports any combination of digital
and analog displays
? Maximum resolution of 2048x1536 per display
? Independent resolution and refresh rate
selection for any two connected displays
? Dual integrated 10-bit per channel 400 MHz
DACs
? Integrated 165 MHz TMDS transmitter (DVI &
HDCP compliant)
? API and Operating systems support
? OpenGL®
? OpenGL Shading Language
? Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0
? DirectX® 9.0 HLSL
? Windows® XP/Windows® 2000
? Linux®
? Graphic Features
? Hardware acceleration of the following:
? Anti-aliased points and lines or full scene
anti-aliasing (2X, 4X, 6X)
? 3D lines and triangles
? Stipple points
? Two-sided lighting
? Up to 8 light sources
? Directional and local lighting
? OpenGL overlay planes
? Occlusion culling
? 6 user defined clip planes
? OpenGL polymode functions
? 32-bit (24+8-bit stencil) Z Buffer
? Fast Z and color clears
? Full DX9 vertex shader support with 4 vertex
units
? Quad-buffer stereo support (FireGL X1-256p
only)
? SMARTSHADER? 2.0
? Programmable pixel and vertex shaders
? 16 textures per pass
? Pixel shaders up to 160 instructions with
32-bit floating point precision for each RGBA
component
? Multiple render target support
? Shadow volume rendering acceleration
? High precision 10-bit per channel frame buffer
support
? SMOOTHVISION? 2.0
? 2X/4X/6X anti-aliasing modes
? High performance adaptive algorithm with
programmable sample patterns
? 2X/4X/8X/16X anisotropic filtering modes
? Adaptive algorithm with bi-linear
(performance) and tri-linear (quality) options
? HYPER Z? III
? 3-level Hierarchical Z-Buffer with early Z
test
? Lossless Z-Buffer compression (up to 24:1)
? Fast Z-Buffer Clear
Advanced lossless
compression algorithms
(color and Z data)
CINEFX Shading Architecture
? Fully programmable GPU (OpenGL 1.5/DirectX
9.0 class)
? Long fragment programs (up to 2048
instructions)
? Long vertex programs (up to 65,536
instructions)
? Looping and subroutines (up to 256 loops per
vertex program)
? Dynamic flow control
? Conditional execution
HIGH-LEVEL SHADER LANGUAGES
? Optimized compiler for Cg and Microsoft HLSL
? OpenGL 1.5 and DirectX 9.0 support
? Open source compiler
HIGH-RESOLUTION ANTIALIASING
? 16x Full-Scene Antialiasing (FSAA) up to
2048x1536 per display or 3840x2400 for single
digital display
? 12-bit subpixel sampling precision enhances
AA quality
APPLICATION COMPATIBILITY
? Optimized and certified for all leading
workstation applications
? Fully compliant with OpenGL 1.5
and DirectX 9.0
UNIFIED DRIVER ARCHITECTURE
? Single driver supports all products
NVIDIA QUADRO APPLICATION UTILITIES
? POWERdraft (AutoCAD)
? MAXtreme (3ds max)
? QuadroView (CAD viewer)
OPERATING SYSTEMS
? Windows® XP (WHQL-certified)
? Windows 2000 (WHQL-certified)
? Windows NT®
? Windows 98, Windows 95
? Linux?Full OpenGL implementation, complete
with NVIDIA and ARB extensions (complete
XFree 86 drivers)
NVIEW ARCHITECTURE
? Advanced multi-display desktop & application
management seamlessly integrated into Microsoft
Windows.
? Dual DVI output?Drives two independent digital
displays at 1600 x1200, or one at 3840x24005.
? Dual-link TMDS?Drive one digital display up to
2048x1536 and another at 1600x1200
simultaneously
? 400 MHz DACs?Two analog displays up to
2048x1536 @ 85Hz each7
? OpenGL stereo support for resolutions up to
3840x2400
? Professional CAD and DCC Certifications
ATi
FireGL X1
NVIDIA Quadro FX 2000
As you can assess for yourself
from the above spec sheets, the Quadro FX 2000 is
essentially an NV30 core based product with identical specs
to a GeForce FX 5800 and the FireGL X1 is an R300 core based
product, with identical specs to a Radeon 9700 Pro.
Even the PCB designs are nearly identical, with the
exception of a few interface options. However, again
both ATi and NVIDIA optimize their respective Core Graphics
technologies at the hardware level (although they are
intentionally vague as to exactly what modifications they
make), to meet the demands of specific CAD, DCC (Digital
Content Creation), 3D Design and Rendering and Analysis
tools applications. As such, they have dubbed its new
Graphics Core "NV30GL" and in the case of ATi's product,
"FGL9700".
**
Article Update - September, 4 2003 **
We recently ask
NVIDIA and ATi to respond back to us with their comments on
the differences in the architecture of their Consumer
based Graphics Cards versus their Pro Graphics solutions.
NVIDIA took the time to respond and here is what we learned.
1.-
Though the PCB appears nearly identical, there are
differences. The heat sync on the Quadro FX boards, for
example, is different and operates more efficiently.
2. - Professional users care about quality,
stability, reliability and accuracy. Their data must be
accurate (people's safety may actually rely on it) and their
applications must run reliably. To ensure quality, NVIDIA
takes extra steps to own the board manufacturing process so
that the parts used do not vary. NVIDIA employs a virtual
model to build its GeForce cards. While quality is still
high with a virtual model, there can be variances from one
board manufacturer to another as they use the same reference
design, but not necessarily identical parts. Since there is
more at stake when you insert a Quadro board into your
professional workflow (i.e. on a deadline to animate a
portion of a movie or complete a virtual prototype of a new
car), NVIDIA maintains tighter controls on the manufacturing
process to ensure a higher standard of quality, consistency
and reliability demanded by its professional users.
3.- It is no secret that NVIDIA
leverages a lot of common technology between its Quadro and
GeForce graphics. If we didn't take advantage of the
economies of scale for Quadro, customers would be paying a
lot more than they do today. That's not necessary. Despite
the technology-sharing, there are stark differences in the
features placed on top of the silicon for Quadro users, they
include:
AA points and lines
Overlay planes
Stereo functionality
Clip regions
2-sided lighting
Hardware Logic Ops (HW XOR)
Harware Stippled Lines
OpenGL Quad buffered stereo
Dual Link
and more...
4. - One of the biggest differences between Quadro
and GeForce is the application certifications obtained for
premiere professional-grade software. We pay people to work
with software vendors to ensure that key applications run
reliably. It takes a lot of man hours and effort to do this,
and is partially responsible for the price premium that
users pay when they purchase a Quadro board. But it's a
must-have. Software makers want certifications too to help
keep their support calls to a minimum.
So there you
have it. Indeed there are functional and hardware
level differences between the Quadro FX and GeForce FX line
of products. Furthermore, as we've stated in the past,
those software certs add to cost of these boards as well.
However, if you are running a CAD Design department on this
hardware, you don't want to worry about platform
compatibility with your hardware.
**
SolidWorks 2003 Benchmark Update - September 4, 2003
**
Finally, since
we initially published this article, we discovered an error
in our SolidWorks 2003 benchmark numbers.
We've made
corrections to the score in the graphs represented here
as a result. The SPECapc test that we utilized for the
SolidWorks 2003 scoring has proven itself to be a bit
finicky sometimes and often times difficult to produce
repeatable results. We have since modified our test
methodology with this benchmark, in an effort to avoid
future mistakes like this. We apologize for any
inconvenience the initial scoring may have caused.
