What is Quadro?

Is this another name for the GeForce?

The Quadro, in Nvidia parlance, is a GPU, or Graphics Processing Unit, much like the GeForce 256. It shares much of the same architecture and design, and was developed concurrently with the GeForce architecture. However, from the very start, Quadro was designed to be a contender in the 3D workstation market, for CAD (Computer Aided Design) and 3D animation and modeling.

In general, a "3D workstation" has to deal with high geometry models in real-time, multiple dynamic light sources, and a higher degree of precision. 3D games on the other hand tend to focus primarily on speed and texture detail, which means lower poly counts and higher fill rates. While GeForce 256 is leading the charge to change the low-poly paradigm, workstation-class applications still have different needs.

So what's new?

What separates the Quadro from the GeForce is the inclusion of additional hardware-accelerated features. Here's the line straight from Nvidia:

"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."

Anti-aliasing? Is this an attempt to match 3dfx's T-Buffer full-scene anti-aliasing? Not really. Primarily, this is a feature that allows users to work easily with high-polygon wireframe models. Similarly, the other features enhance such aspects as accelerated 3d playback, animation, and effects.

What other features can we look forward to seeing?

From the press release, we see that the texture fill rate of Quadro is 540 million pixels per second. At 125MHz, the GeForce 256 can crank out 480 million pixels/sec. From this we can calculate the core frequency of the Quadro as 135MHz - which can be considered by tweakers as a mild overclock of the GeForce chip. Nvidia's suggested memory speed is 166MHz for SDR (single data rate) SDRAM, and 333MHz for double data rate.

The Quadro hardware supports anywhere from 8 to 128MB of main memory. Even with the phenomenal growth of consumer 3D, 128MB for a current-generation accelerator seems like it would add significantly to the cost of an already-expensive part at 32MB. On the other hand, a large frame buffer is exactly what the doctor ordered for workstation computing, and the upper limit looks to fit the task quite well.