Today NVIDIA announced the newest of the professional Quadro line of graphics cards, the Quadro FX 5800. The card is the latest of the company’s graphic design professional cards which are aimed at enterprises, studios, and other professional users. The card indeed sports a number of features not present on the consumer equivalent, as well as a massive 4GB of RAM. The price tag, however, is hefty with a Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) of $3,499. That’s unfortunately enough to keep most consumers/gamers away, even if it can run Crysis.

The features sported by the new card include interactive 4D modeling with time lapses, a memory bandwidth of up to 102 GB per second, and fill rates of over 52 billion texels per second. The behemoth can calculate around 300 million triangles per second. Its 4 GB of RAM are more than on any consumer-level cards, and the chip is built with 240 CUDA programmable parallel processing cores. Even the dual GPU cards NVIDIA has built for enthusiasts, such as the 9800 GX only have 2 GB of RAM.

Areas where this kind of performance is needed, and where the cost is justified, are the fields of oil and gas exploration, medical imaging and the styling/design fields, say NVIDIA. A good example of where the power of the FX 5800 might be used is given by Thilaka Sumanaweera, CTO of CyberHeart. She told the press that ''The advanced textured graphics capabilities of the Quadro FX 5800 are enabling CyberHeart to provide 3D radiosurgical target visualization and definition tools for the purpose of treating cardiac arrhythmias. Our applications are processing very large data sets acquired by the state-of-the-art 64-slice CT scanners using respiratory- and cardiac-gating. The Quadro FX cards provide us with the extreme bandwidth necessary to support our cutting-edge technology, and essentially, save lives.''

NVIDIA’s Quadro series of graphics cards (and their ATI FireGL counterparts) are usually designed around the same GPUs as equivalent consumer-oriented cards by the companies, but usually feature several differences on the circuit board as well as different drivers. Gamer variants of the newer models have fuses in the die to prevent professional features from being enabled, but on older models switching to the professional variant was usually only a matter of applying modified drivers and perhaps a few zero-ohm resistors on the PCB.

The professional series of graphics cards have more features and will run faster on Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Digital Content Creation (DCC) applications. They do not necessarily run faster on games, with some cards actually seeing a slowdown in gaming performance due to more features being enabled.

Quadro FX 5800 graphics cards are being sold by PNY Technologies in the United States and Europe, Elsa in Japan and Leadtek in the rest of the Asian continent.