NVIDIA Quadro DDR

The competitors

NVIDIA’s competitors in the technical workstation graphics card market segment include 3Dlabs, Evens & Sutherland, Diamond, and Intergraph.  Some of the key characteristics of NVIDIA's Quadro based cards and the competitors’ products sold on the open market are summarized in the following table:

Note: The 3Dlabs GVX210 was announced an shown in August, 1999 but is not yet in production.

In addition to these products other high end products are available as part of complete workstation systems: 

1) Intergraph Wildcat cards in Intergraph, Dell, Compaq and IBM workstations.

2) HP’s fx+ series of graphics processors available in their workstations.

3) SGI’s line of NT workstations with SGI’s own integrated graphics processor (Cobalt).

4) NEC’s new line of high end NT workstation with their hot new TE4E graphics systems on sale in Japan at only about $15K-$25K US.

Price – The sweet spot in this market seem to be in the $500-$1000 range; 18 months ago it was $2000-$3000.

Drivers - Cards sold into this market need to have OpenGL driver tuning profiles set up for the mainstream technical applications.

Transform & Lighting  – Dedicated transform and lighting hardware can provide real performance benefits when running large models.

Memory system - A graphics card’s memory design is one good indicator of its fill rate performance potential.

The Quadro GPU designs does appear to have a key technical advantage over the competition; it has an on chip 50 Gflop transform and lighting engine. Of the other cards only the 3Dlabs (GVX1 and GVX210) and expensive Wildcat 4110 cards have this specialized hardware support.  However, note that these cards use a separate processor chip for this function and that the processing rate is approximately 10 to 16 times slower.