Nvidia Launches Massively Powerful First Ever 4 GB Graphics Card

Nvidia says its latest graphics card, the Quadro FX 5800, is the most powerful in the company’s history.

The card offers up to 240 programmable parallel cores that supports CUDA, Nvidia’s proprietary C language development environment for programmers, and 4GB of graphics memory.

"There is nothing else like it in the industry and we believe that this will be the case for some time," says an Nvidia spokesperson."The combination of the performance, capabilities and features are unrivaled."

While playing Gears of War 2 on it might be awesomely cool, the card is only for professional applications such as oil and gas exploration, diagnosing illness or high-performance automotive design, all of which require large amounts of data to be processed for quick visual computing.

"The Quadro FX 5800 has advanced features to allow massive data sets to be viewed beyond traditional 3D enabling professionals to make fast and accurate decisions,"

said Jeff Brown, general manager, professional solutions for Nvidia in a statement.

Compared to the previous high-end Quadro solution, Nvidia’s latest card doubles almost every relevant product spec (for instance, 4GB memory vs. 1.5GB earlier) says the company.

Other features of the card include interactive 4D modeling with time lapse capabilities, memory bandwidth of up to 102 GB per second and 30-bit color for extremely high color fidelity.

All of this allows professional users to view their models with higher degrees of precision and realism, says Nvidia.

The Quadro FX 5800 graphics board, which has started shipping, will be available for $3500.

Gamers and general tech enthusiasts though will have to reckon with a less powerful version of the Quadro FX 5800 from the Nvidia GeForce product family.

"The Quadro variant of the base technology is actually a super-set including the features and capabilities that professionals require; thus it takes substantially more time to productize," says the Nvidia spokesperson.

The closest consumer equivalent would be the GeForce GTX 280 with its 240 processor cores but just 1 GB of memory.