NVIDIA Corp.

Advanced graphics card

Santa Clara, Calif.-based NVIDIA Corp. recently unveiled its enhanced professional graphics card – the NVIDIA® Quadro® FX 5800.

“The size and complexity of data is growing at an exponential rate. The challenge for today’s professional is to make sense of the mountain of data by distilling it into a form they can comprehend, analyze, and use to make impactful decisions,” says Jeff Brown, general manager of professional solutions at NVIDIA.

“At stake can be billions of investment dollars, or even people’s lives. The Quadro FX 5800 has advanced features to allow massive datasets to be viewed beyond traditional 3-D, enabling professionals to make fast and accurate decisions.”

The Quadro FX 5800 graphics card offers advanced performance and scalability to visualize and interpret datasets that were previously unattainable on a workstation graphics board.

Offering up to 240 CUDA™ programmable parallel core and the industry’s first 4GB of graphics memory, the Quadro FX 5800 graphics card is suitable for oil and gas exploration, medical imaging, styling and design, and scientific visualization. Other advanced features of the Quadro FX 5800 graphics card include:

• Interactive 4-D modeling with time lapse capabilities

• Massive memory bandwidth of up to 102 GB per second

• Fill rates that exceed 52 billion texels per second and geometry performance of 300 million triangles per second

• Support for next-generation OpenGL and Microsoft DirectX 10 applications

• Advanced multisystem and multidevice visualization environments with Quadro G-Sync II

“Landmark’s recently launched GeoProbe R5000 software empowers geoscientists with an unprecedented ability to visualize large-scale regional datasets at full resolution from a standard Linux workstation,” says Nicholas Purday, manager of geophysical technologies at Houston-based Landmark.

“The Quadro FX 5800 graphics card is a more powerful GPU and superior triangle performance, which make it possible for the GeoProbe application to quickly render large surfaces, and allow us to move many computing-intensive processes to the graphics card, significantly enhancing the overall user experience.”

Thilaka Sumanaweera, CTO of Menlo Park, Calif.-based CyberHeart, a medical device company developing noninvasive radiosurgical systems for cardiac applications, says, “The advanced textured graphics capabilities of the Quadro FX 5800 are also enabling CyberHeart to provide 3-D radiosurgical target visualization and definition tools for the purpose of treating cardiac arrhythmias.”

“Our applications are processing very large datasets 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.”

The Quadro FX 5800 GPU features true 10-bit color, enabling billions – rather than millions – of color variations for advanced image quality with a broad dynamic range. Professionals can benefit from viewing their models with higher degrees of precision.

“Our customers are making important decisions about future products on the basis of [Realtime Technology-powered] 3-D real-time models,” says Ludwig Fuchs, cofounder and CEO of Australia-based Realtime Technology.

“The new Quadro FX 5800 will be the platform of choice to bring that arena to the next level. Higher levels of realism, physical correctness, and large models are now made possible through a double number of cores and a generous frame buffer.”

— NVIDIA Corp.
www.nvidia.com