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NVIDIA’s Quadro FX 3700 Ups CAD Performance
Graphics board delivers performance boost of up to 2X
Beth Stackpole, Contributing Editor -- Design News, February 24, 2008
NVIDIA is taking aim at 3-D CAD users looking for a performance boost with the introduction of its new high-end Quadro FX 3700 graphics board.
The Quadro FX 3700 comes stocked with 112 parallel processors, 512 Mbyte of onboard graphics memory and a 256-bit memory interface. The benefits of this high-tech hardware mix are higher throughput for interactive visualization while also boosting the graphics board’s ability to handle the large-size models and complex shaders that are so closely associated with today’s CAD and digital content creation applications, according to NVIDIA officials. Specifically, the board’s new functions make it capable of delivering a performance boost of up to 2X compared to NVIDIA’s previous generation of professional graphics boards, which translates into faster interactivity with CAD models, as well as lower latency for CAD users.
The FX 3700, which sits at the top of NVIDIA’s mid-range professional graphics board line, is the first of that series to be based on the company’s Unified Architecture, introduced last year in the consumer graphics board products. The Unified Architecture enables sophisticated shaders to virtually simulate a range of physical characteristics, including lighting effects (dispersion, reflection and refraction, for example) and physical surface properties (casting effects or porosity). Support for real-time shaders allow such effects to be combined and modified interactively — an ability that can’t be accomplished with 2-D static texture maps, the officials say.
Another noteworthy feature of the Quadro FX 3700 is its support for NVIDIA’s Application Configuration Engine (ACE), which automatically configures the graphic hardware to run optimally for whatever software application is chosen. “Prior to ACE, someone loading (Dassault’s) CATIA, for example, would have to manually adjust the setting to run optimally for display,” says Scott Fitzpatrick, product manager of NVIDIA’s Professional Services Group. “Now it’s done when the application opens so you don’t have to mess around with settings and it makes the experience easier for the CAD user.”
Other features of the board, available now for $1,599, include support for PCI-Express Gen 2, which doubles the data transfer rate between the graphics processing unit (GPU) and Gen 2 chipsets to 16 Gbps and Energy Star 4.0 compliance.
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 NVIDIA’s Quadro FX 3700 is tuned for CAD and digital content applications. |
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