VR World » FX 5800

Nvidia officially unveils civil “CX” and FX5800 monster

Theo Valich — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 14:00:14 +0000

Last week, I did a short piece about the way how Nvidia is trying to bridge the 32-/64-bit divide, and today, the company officially unveiled Quadro FX 4800 and FX 5800.
Quadro FX 4800 shares a lot of similarities with Adobe-oriented CX, but features 216 shaders (yes, GTX-260 brother here, if my sources were correct) and 1.5 GB of GDDR3 memory. But the star of the today’s launch is FX 5800, the new flagship of Quadro fleet.
In a way, we already know everything about FX 5800, since Nvidia demonstrated the product back in August at Siggraph 2008, followed by Nvision 08 – so, specs come as of no surprise to anybody.
FX5800 features GT200 chip with all 240 shader processors (with 30 “invisible” FP64-capable Double Precision register units – 1 per group of 8 shaders), coupled with massive 4GB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 816 MHz in DDR mode (1.63 GT/s). As it usually happens with Quadro products, Nvidia did not reveal the clocks, but fill-rate of 52 billion texels and 300 milion triangles/sec can lead to calculator, and calculator leads us to believe that for the first time in ages, Quadro product is actually clocked higher than the reference GeForce card it was built upon. As far as I know, GeForce GTX 280 comes with fill-rate of 48.2 Gtexels, while this Quadro card features 4 GTexel/s more, or roughly 40 MHz higher clockspeed. Of course, I could be wrong…

FX5800 actually debuted 3 months ago, tucked inside QuadroPlex 2200, with two of these monsters inside...again, not the brightest moment in history of Nvidia's mkt department.

The card supports Quadro G-Sync II, but I am much more interested in the fact that you can just take the old Quadro card out, put the FX5800 in and hook it up to an SDI daughterboard, which is something that broadcast industry will appreciate. The price of the board is $3400, and seeing how the prices raged in the previous era, I have to say that having competition is really, really good. ATi Radeon forced Nvidia to reshuffle its GeForce pricing segment and now FirePro did the same with Quadro FX series.
Thanks heavens, we (finally) have a war in workstation world. Now it is time to see RV770 chip with 4GB of memory as well… even though, ATI could technically came up with 4GB board as well, if it would use 4850X2 as a base for it. There is no way in hell we could see 4GB GDDR5 boards on the market, the higher density chips are not available atm.

P.S. with Nvidia continuing its funny usage of “FX” moniker, isn’t it funny that currently, the most powerful 3D card on face of the planet shares the same name as the most powerful dustbuster card that ever existed… yes, the mighty loud GeForce FX 5800. Yes, please do click on a link, some Monday laugh guaranteed.

P.P.S. Where’s the OpenGL 3.0 support guys?

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Nvidia plans to bridge the 32-bit and 64-bit divide

Theo Valich — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 21:59:26 +0000

When you are designing a workstation product, you’re not designing what your engineers want, but rather what the customer will buy. Workstation market is much more conservative than consumer one, and a lot of design changes have to be made in order to accomodate this, still much smaller market.
Currently, the biggest headache in the workstation world is 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems. While the FX community already went for 64-bit operating system, a lot of organizations are resisting to change and remain in the 32-bit world with its applications and broad compatibility.
This was a big challenge for both ATI and Nvidia, who went out with 2GB or 2GB+ parts (FireGL V8650 and upcoming Quadro FX5800 come to mind) and saw that they had to reshape the drives in order to work perfectly with 32-bit applications.

Nvidia's Quadro CX is getting a twin brother...

This is also the reason why Quadro CX and the upcoming 4800/5800 line-up feature a model geared to 32-bit and a model geared towards 64-bit users. If you want all the latest and greatest that 64-bit world can offer you, you will go for the Quadro FX 5800. If you need broadest compatibility, you will go with the CX/4800, and the problem is solved.

Thus, CX/4800 will be nothing else but a souped up GTX260 cards with 1536 MB of memory, while the FX5800 will be that monster with 4GB of memory.

All in all, I have to agree with Tim Sweeney when he announced his disappointment with Microsoft Vista – we had the ideal chance to bring 64-bit operating system to life and get rid of this duality that only drives application engineers to the ground. I guess we’ll have to wait for Windows 7 to finally wave goodbye to graphics cards that can’t have 2GB of memory or more…

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Nvidia makes a “stupid” call with brilliant RapiHD

Theo Valich — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 04:00:22 +0000

With the release of Adobe Creative Studio 4, Elemental Technologies finally launched their own RapiHD CUDA-accelerator for Premiere Pro.

RapiHD... only for Quadro CS... CX. Darn shame...

As team of users of Sony 1080p and RED One (4K FTW!) camera, my guys expected that RapiHD will be a brilliant add-on to my configuration consisted out of two 4-core Intel Xeons@3 GHz, brilliant ASUS Skulltrail-lite motherboard and Nvidia Quadro FX 4600 SDI. SDI is a paramount when working with HD signal and RED camera, since it tremendously speeds up the workflow. I am first to admit that I am not exactly at home with video production per se, but I well know what to do to make things work, and make them work fast. And now, here comes RapiHD. I wrote about this plug-in couple of times on TG Daily, and saw the funny side of 32-bit limitation when it came to testing on Quadro FX 5800 on 32-bit OS (FX5800 has 4GB of RAM, thus performance sucked unless you would reg-hack the card down to 2GB or upgrade to 64-bit OS).

The CS4 launch came and went, and RapiHD site got the links to Quadro CX product web-page. So, what happened? Well, Nvidia has exclusive bundling deal for RapiHD and the company decided to bundle that pack exclusively with Quadro CX. I spoke with Elemental Technologies Sam Blackman and he told me that Adobe certified Nvidia Quadro CX and that is the preferred solution for Adobe CS4. Alarms went in my head like no tomorrow, since Quadro CSCX comes with quite an interesting set of specs. Of course, I reserve the right to be proven wrong if Quadro CX has some special juice inside. But I see a cut-down GT200 chip with 192 processors, 384-bit memory controller and 1.5 GB of video memory. In essence, we’re talking about this:

“Old” GTX260 GPU – 64-bit memory controller lane + higher density GDDR3 = Quadro CX.

So yes, compatibility with 32-bit OS is a given here, but shouldn’t you tell to video production industry – “please migrate to 64-bit, things are rosy there?” Everybody and his uncle know that Hollywood listened and now FX is better than ever (BTW, full-scale models in Battlestar Galactica are rendered on AMD Opteron machine with Quadro FX inside – no render machine mumbo jumbo – and that was made possible with a 64-bit OS and 16GB of memory). Guys, please, put RapiHD as an option or a bundle on SDI add-on card as well, since the most powerful and wanted solution for movie producers would be Quadro FX 5800 plus SDI add-on card. That’s my opinion – my two cents, of course.

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