New Quadros - 5500 w/1GB VRAM

[amccabe]

NVIDIA announced 6 new quadros today - a whole new line of them. They are ... (ahem) the 5500, 3500, 1500, 560, 550, and 350. The most exciting news is the 5500 - which has 1GB of VRAM. Otherwise the 5500 looks similar to the 4500 but with more ram. NVIDIA doesn't have any tech specs on their site yet and there aren't any for sale anywhere as of me writing this post.

We have the 4500 in our 3 new windows workstations and the 4400 in Darth, incase anyone was wondering (or incase anyone wonders why I care about Quadros).

[dcv]

How does the 5500 stack up against the ATI FireGL V7350? It looks like the ATI has a bigger memory bandwidth and faster VRAM (1 GB GDDR3 vs. 1 GB GDDR2) - but I know absolutely nothing about high-end rendering cards, so is the Quadro 5500 the better card?

http://www.ati.com/products/workstation/fireglmatrix.html
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_11761.html

[dparm]

Only a matter of time before ATI releases a 1GB Radeon and NVIDIA releases a 1GB GeForce.........

[abudhu]

They seem to stack well with each other, but I will reserve "winners" until I see some reviews. Something to note however, is that much like Intel, ATI chooses to use longer pipe-lines which means it has to have more "high-end" components to push the data. Whereas Nvidia has typically followed a more AMD-esc method in using shorter pipes so less shear horsepower is needed to drive the same amount of data. This was true for the entire 6800 line, and I am not sure that statement holds true with this new line, but it's something to think about.

I believe the 8800 series, or the 9800 (thats nvidia) series at the latest should support 1GB. I remember hearing many "leaks" that 8800 series will have 1GB. I am sure that this card will also cost 500+ dollars and will be an absolute waste of money.

I am waiting for Vista to launch so that Direct X 10 will be out, thus making all other video cards obsolete. I believe Ati and Nvidia have started making "beta" versions of their DX10 cards, and some of the top tier gaming companies are coding for it. So it will be very exciting.

[sfontes]

Mm....1GB GeForce...*likes NVIDIA*

[amccabe]

Tom's Hardware just did a comparison between the Quadro 4500 and the ATI FireGL V7350 and V7300.

They are a 3 way tie in synthetic benchmarks, but the Quadro is clearly the winner in Application benchmarks (and that is the Quadro 4500, not 5500).

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/06/16/opengl_workstation_graphics/

[dparm]

With the release of the 7950GT, you can now get 1GB of GDDR3.......

[picch]

*loves nvidia*