NVIDIA's Quadro FX 5800 with 4GB graphics memory is 'the most powerful graphics card in history'
By Thomas Ricker 
posted Nov 10th 2008 6:44AM
posted Nov 10th 2008 6:44AM
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Holy GPU power Batman
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't these kinds of GPUs (the Quadro line or example) not any good with graphic-intensive games? But I mean still, holy GPU power Batman indeed!
Yes, you are correct actually. These things put all their processing power towards geometry and dont perform well with shader operations. They are meant for CAD work where there are no shader operations, just drawing models as fast as possible is the most important thing.
Its not powerful at all. All these new 'Quadro' scams coming out now are simply GTX280s with slightly optimized boards and MOAR vRAM.
The Adobe CS4 acceleration is also a scam. There is nothing these can do that a GTX280 cannot, at maybe 95% its speed. A KO Edition GTX280 will rip the balls off this thing.
Nah, I think the Mayan might have something more powerful from the alien that allowed them to design their pyramids and study the sky.
@JerkfacedFed
That's not accurate. The primary difference between the two lines is the QA and features that go into the drivers. In terms of hardware they are very much alike.
In the past with some Quadro cards, you could simply opt to run standard GeForce Drivers (read: second hardware profile or dual boot) and get decent 3D gaming performance out of them. However, I am not up to date and do not know if this still works with more contemporary nVIDIA Quadro hardware.
The Same used to be true with ATi's FireGL line (Pre-AMD), but I don't know you can still run Catalyst drivers on more modern stuff.
wow
I dont know, but wouldn't it be cheaper to get a rendering farm stuffed with loads of slightly older cards...
Not in terms of electricity cost over the long run. That's what these big number-crunching data centers care about more.
I think any research facility will think hard and long on whether they really need the extra RAM. With that same price you can build a super computer of 9xGTX 280's. As long as you're using CUDA you don't need to change anything.
Keep in mind that there is not a lot of places that render in GPU.
GPU is still only being used at the front end while making a model.
Unless you are rendering realtime, for the price dual quadcores are the way to go (for now)
Most powerful....until next week and the next model comes out.
Being that it has been 19 months since the FX 5600 came out, that is probably unlikely.
I can't wait for Intel to enter this market. Nvidia need a kick up the arse.
Competition drives innovation!
"4D modeling"
Woah, It models TIME? AMAZING!
Or thousands of hyper cubes
It's so powerful that Nvidia had to utilize a new dimension just to show its true potential.
Kind of like how the PS3 can push 4D graphics.
Remember that one?
Actually, the fourth dimension, time, is used to predict fluid and gas migration in oil and gas reservoirs over a specific period of time.
So yes, it is used.
You spent harness wrong j.q.
You spelt spelt wrong dumbass.
You both spelled spelled wrong.
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4ADBF_enUS299US299&q=define%3a+spelt
No we haven't you idiot It's part of the English language. Might not be the usa because you don't know how to spell.
http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/spelt?view=uk
Does it play Doom?
in b4 can it play crysis
I wonder is crytek likes being at the end of this joke?
Splendid.
Thanks.
If it is the most powerful it wont be for long,
ATI is planning to get serious in the workstation market and take that away from Nvidia ;)
Looking back, its really amazing how fast these graphics cards or improving. Reminds me of the old processor speed races back in the late 90's early 00's when every month processors would increase by some "at the time" huge leap of several hundred MHz, haha. I like what I'm seeing though, don't play many games, but its always better for the video editing... and I cant wait to see what OS's are going to start looking like when these super powerful graphics chips become common place. 4GB!!! Damn.
But can it play Outside?
http://blog.codefront.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/outside_mmorpg.jpg
Please tell me a poster of that exists.
How does their PvP ruleset work? I hate it when guards come chasing me in town because I killed someone.
Amazing card, just don't use it with Vista Home or you'll have NO RAM left :-p
But NVidia probably won't have 32bit drivers anyway:)
You really have no idea what you are talking about do you.
Laughing_Man, Lorre is correct - as is everyone else who pointed out that you are wrong. The way it works in most 32bit OS's is that every piece of hardware gets mapped to a memory address - the Intel and AMD CPUs, in 32bit mode can access 4GB. Take that 4GB and remap a device's address space in the first available region. When complete, that 4GB is now less. You can look it up online. Thus, using this card in a computer running a 32bit OS would leave you with negative available memory. 4GB max system RAM/address space MINUS the PCI and other busses MINUS all other devices LEAVES something already less than 4GB - MINUS 4GB+ for this card leaves you a negative number.
Now... theoretically, on certain versions of Windows, and on supported hardware, you can enable PAE mode for the kernel, which will then do 36bit addressing and help alleviate that issue. Or you can run a 64bit OS.
Or, one final possibility... nVidia can write drivers that swap memory the old fashioned way (ie: no flat memory space accessing), though there may be a big speed penalty... because lets say they use 512MB blocks... it would take 8 swaps to handle the card's full 4GB - and since the data could not be acted upon in one chunk, it would mean those 8 swaps may have to occur numerous times to complete a transaction.
Thank you for joining the dumb ass brigade. Lets talk about computers. First off, by your logic, since my CPU has to address all memory in my computer, that would mean my hard drive takes from that as well. Seeing as how my hard drives total around 880 GB, I am pretty damn sure that is wrong.
The way it ACTUALLY WORKS is that limitation is imposed on your system RAM only. The GDDR RAM on a Graphics Card (unless integrated) is address and accessed by the GPU on the card only. You CPU cannot address that RAM because it does not have access to it. This is why graphics even have an address controller stat (in bit size) in the first place, because it addresses its memory. A dedicated graphics card is basically a small computer inside your big computer. It has its own memory, own processor core, etc. The size of the memory on you graphics card has no barring on your computer available memory (unless integrated).
Sweeeeet, I bet you can get Crysis running at 18fps!
at 3840 x 2400 ? yeah it probably can =]
Probably not, but it'll be the most detailed 1FPS you can get!
I'll take 2.
Can anyone tell me where i can sell both my kidneys?
Africa, South America and China are good places to start. Well they were when I sold mine at least.
4D modelling is a type of 3D seismogram synthesis migrated over time (primarily only displaying the first derivative of the horizons of interest) :P It differs from conventional 3D modelling which is normally static and is used very differently. Hence the name....
Now I want 4D modeling in PC games! Like changing the seismogram data with my rocket launcher xD
Thanks for explanation!
Seriously, what happens with a 32-bit OS with this card??? The 4GB of VRAM would use up all the 32-bit addressable memory space !
You don't use a 32-bit OS for this type of data processing. You have to graduate to a 64-bit OS to run with the big boys...
You are an idiot. That has nothing to do with your computer's address space. The VRAM on a graphics card is only accessable by the graphics card. You computer doesn't see that memory, so it can't address it.
Actually, it is addressable by the computer and does count towards the 4GB memory limit.
The only way your graphics memory affects your total system memory is if it is integrated. A dedicated card has its own memory and its own memory controller completely independent of your CPU memory address controller.
I can't believe you people low ranked me for telling the truth. So you guys either need to pick up a book and read, or stop playing games on your piss weak ass laptops with your integrated Intel G3100 and upgrade to a real PC.
How your CPU sees your GPU's memory and an explaination of how it is actually addressed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOMMU
As you can clearly read, the CPU's memory controller is for address RAM memory, the only memory it has direct access to besides its caches. THe IOMMU handles the device addressing.
I can has in my next computer build? :3
That thing has more on-board memory than my whole computer... Not to mention the card alone also costs almost 10 times more than it also.
Netbooks are not real computers...
Yes they are.
Oil and gas exploration? everybody knows that Exxon already knows where all the oil is, they are just sitting on it. They just buy cards like this to play Unreal Tournament while the money rolls in.
No.
We are not doing this.
4gb!!! IMBA... bet it could run mario all by itself. LOL
In the end, all of it will end up somewhere in China. e-waste.
wow, emo much?
Should help with Open CL and exponentially increase video encoding performance.
The 4GB of RAM wouldn't do anything at all in terms of gaming performance, even if this was a gaming oriented card. Games today don't need 4GB of RAM, there's no way that you will need to buffer that much data with the current state of in-game graphics.
This is a professional card, and nVidia is doing a good job of getting a lot of PR with it. Saying they have the fastest card (even if it's only a professional card) piques the interest of gamers and enthusiasts, even though there's no way that it would be useful or practical for gaming.
i hope they know to have a 64 bit OS lulz.
"the most powerful graphics card in history"
Don't you mean for the next 4 months?
And by the next 4 months they'll have a new one.
Yeah, but how many frame rates can you get with the highest video settings on in Crysis?
We've seen this joke 3 or 4 times in this one article.
1 framerate per monitor. Do you mean what frame rate?
psh my 4mb Geforce 2 Go could give this fat s.o.b. a lickin'
-___- *sigh* i wanna get atleast 1 for my graphic design!! but the money...better start saving up!!! =P
for all you people sayying how this card won't be the best for long, i wouldn't think like that...when nvidia says best, that means they aren't releasing anything better until someone releases a better car...that's where ati's fire pro 8700 (with a quarter of the ram XD) comes in!!
for the other stupid people who are asking questions about games, shutup and get a gtx280. the quadro is a workstation card meant for quality work that takes time!! it's high precision to make stuff like commercials and games that you gamers play. those car commercials are done with these kind of graphic cards, ON COMPUTER ONLY! (quite impressive actually =P) gaming card is just taking information and rendering them roughly. gaming cards are about fps of low quality 3d models and renderings... go look at an audi r8 commercial...that was ALL done with quadro workstation cards in a rendering farm...
It is a capital goods.
forgot to add, the ram on the graphic card has nothing to do with anything, but the gpu!! it's only the gpu that has direct connection. that ram is only for storing those calculations that make up the frames on your screen.
And textures, scenes, models, shaders, and the cup holder/cigarette lighter combo... and it'd still have room to eat my soul.
For the things this card is designed to be used for, that much vRAM might really be needed at times. But without a core/memory clock fast enough, that much vRAM could slow the memory operations and create a bottleneck. 102GB/s on 2GB is about twice as fast as 102GB/s on 4GB. Less stuff to access over the same bus. Wait, 102GB/s -> 4GB. Whoa...
Who still has a 32-bit OS? I didn't think people still used that?
Windows XP was the first Microsoft OS to have a 64bit version. I only mention MS because it is the mainstream. Linux, Apple and the derivatives have had 64bit OSes for many years past.
How did they run the Sparc64 then?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC
A mate of mine had the thing for ages, running FreeBSD, way before AMD got serous with 64 bit.
Laughing Man - I have a Quadro FX 1700 512mb DDR2 I purchased recently for my Precision 370 box. My box has 4GB of ram installed with win2k3 32bit OS. Actual RAM identified 3.34 BEFORE installing the FX 1700. Installed it came out to 2.25 available. I did not know what it was at first. BIOS recognized my 4gb but the OS refused, so I took an old hard drive and built XP-32bit on it. Same results, 2.25gb. I removed the card and put in a basic PCI graphics card and voila, 3.34 available was back. I double checked the specs on nvidia website to ensure my card had its own 512mb which it does.
I am posting just my experience which leads me to believe in what RobertMfromLI states above.