The NVIDIA Quadro FX 2000 And The ATi FireGL X1
Professional Graphics Solutions Do Battle

By: Dave Altavilla
August 20, 2003

 
Professional Graphics Cards are sort of an oddity to us here at HotHardware.com.  Admittedly, we don't get to tinker enough in this area, since frankly the market that is served by these products is a specialty niche, where there just isn't the same level of marketing buzz, as in the Consumer Graphics space.  Not too mention, the fact that if you want to fairly represent a product's performance and features, from our perspective, one needs to look at a number of different application scenarios.  The high end CAD and 3D design and rendering applications, as well as the benchmarks to go with them, that are required for proper measurement and analysis, are also not nearly as common place as firing up Quake 3 and running a time demo.  Regardless, we occasionally like to offer a first hand look at what's new in Pro Graphics each year and certainly there have been many new products to hit the market over the past few months.

However, again since we deal so often in Consumer Graphics, Pro Graphics cards and the price points they carry are still a bit foreign to us.  Why is it that both products we'll be looking at today, the ATi FireGL X1 and NVIDIA Quadro FX 2000, share nearly identical hardware with their consumer counterparts, yet cost 3 to 5 times as much?  The answer goes back to those highly specialized applications again, and optimizing the hardware and drivers to accelerate performance to the best of the core Graphics Processor's ability.  Additionally, each major tools suite, like SolidWorks for example, has it's own set of "certification" criteria if hardware vendors like ATi or NVIDIA want to have full support for their product, back through the tools vendor.  Just imagine large Corporate IT Professionals outfitting their CAD Labs with hardware that is not "officially" supported by their most important design tool suite?  Well you get the idea.  This isn't a game of Quake we're talking here, this is corporate sales and there's a whole new meaning to the word "support" at this level.

In this article we'll be showcasing the first round offerings of next generation Pro Graphics products from ATi and NVIDIA, the ATi FireGL X1 and the NVIDIA Quadro FX 2000.  Very recently, the FireGL X2 was announced, as well as the Quadro FX 3000.  We'll be covering those products in future articles but for now lets see how an NV30GL GPU and a FGL9700 VPU match up head to head.

Features And Specs A Tale Of Two Pro Graphics Titans

As you can assess for yourself from the above spec sheets, the Quadro FX 2000 is essentially an NV30 core based product with identical specs to a GeForce FX 5800 and the FireGL X1 is an R300 core based product, with identical specs to a Radeon 9700 Pro.  Even the PCB designs are nearly identical, with the exception of a few interface options.  However, again both ATi and NVIDIA optimize their respective Core Graphics technologies at the hardware level (although they are intentionally vague as to exactly what modifications they make), to meet the demands of specific CAD, DCC (Digital Content Creation), 3D Design and Rendering and Analysis tools applications.  As such, they have dubbed its new Graphics Core "NV30GL" and in the case of ATi's product, "FGL9700".

** Article Update - September, 4 2003 **

We recently ask NVIDIA and ATi to respond back to us with their comments on the differences in the architecture of  their Consumer based Graphics Cards versus their Pro Graphics solutions.  NVIDIA took the time to respond and here is what we learned.

1. - Though the PCB appears nearly identical, there are differences. The heat sync on the Quadro FX boards, for example, is different and operates more efficiently.

2. -  Professional users care about quality, stability, reliability and accuracy. Their data must be accurate (people's safety may actually rely on it) and their applications must run reliably. To ensure quality, NVIDIA takes extra steps to own the board manufacturing process so that the parts used do not vary. NVIDIA employs a virtual model to build its GeForce cards. While quality is still high with a virtual model, there can be variances from one board manufacturer to another as they use the same reference design, but not necessarily identical parts. Since there is more at stake when you insert a Quadro board into your professional workflow (i.e. on a deadline to animate a portion of a movie or complete a virtual prototype of a new car), NVIDIA maintains tighter controls on the manufacturing process to ensure a higher standard of quality, consistency and reliability demanded by its professional users.

3.-  It is no secret that NVIDIA leverages a lot of common technology between its Quadro and GeForce graphics. If we didn't take advantage of the economies of scale for Quadro, customers would be paying a lot more than they do today. That's not necessary. Despite the technology-sharing, there are stark differences in the features placed on top of the silicon for Quadro users, they include:
AA points and lines
Overlay planes
Stereo functionality
Clip regions
2-sided lighting
Hardware Logic Ops (HW XOR)
Harware Stippled Lines
OpenGL Quad buffered stereo
Dual Link
and more...

4. - One of the biggest differences between Quadro and GeForce is the application certifications obtained for premiere professional-grade software. We pay people to work with software vendors to ensure that key applications run reliably. It takes a lot of man hours and effort to do this, and is partially responsible for the price premium that users pay when they purchase a Quadro board. But it's a must-have. Software makers want certifications too to help keep their support calls to a minimum.

So there you have it.  Indeed there are functional and hardware level differences between the Quadro FX and GeForce FX line of products.  Furthermore, as we've stated in the past, those software certs add to cost of these boards as well.  However, if you are running a CAD Design department on this hardware, you don't want to worry about platform compatibility with your hardware.

**  SolidWorks 2003 Benchmark Update - September 4, 2003  **

Finally, since we initially published this article, we discovered an error in our SolidWorks 2003 benchmark numbers.  We've made corrections to the score in the graphs represented here as a result.  The SPECapc test that we utilized for the SolidWorks 2003 scoring has proven itself to be a bit finicky sometimes and often times difficult to produce repeatable results.  We have since modified our test methodology with this benchmark, in an effort to avoid future mistakes like this.  We apologize for any inconvenience the initial scoring may have caused.

A Closer Look At The Cards