NVIDIA Advances Graphics for CAD and DCC Visualization

By DE Editors

NVIDIA (Santa Clara, CA) announced the NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700, a high-end graphics board capable of delivering a performance increase of up to 2X as compared to the previous generation of product.

The Quadro FX 3700 graphics board, with an MSRP of $1599, offers high throughput for interactive visualization, and with 112 parallel processors, 512MB of onboard graphics memory, and a 256-bit memory interface, the card manages the large models and complex, real-time shaders that dominate the CAD and digital content creation (DCC) markets.

The graphics board incorporates the NVIDIA Application Configuration Engine (ACE), and offers SLI technology to dynamically scale graphics performance, enhance image quality, and expand display real estate. It offers PCI-Express Gen 2 support, essentially doubling the data transfer rate between the GPU and the Gen 2 chipsets to a blazing fast 16Gbps. Also, it is Energy Star 4.0 compliant, consuming less than 80 watts of power for improved energy management.

The NVIDIA Unified Architecture enables sophisticated shaders to simulate a virtually unlimited range of physical characteristics, such as lighting effects and physical surface properties. Real-time shaders allow these effects to be combined and modified interactively, impossible with simple 2D static texture maps.

The board supports the NVIDIA CUDA technology, which allows application developers to use the massively parallel computation power of the Quadro FX 3700 graphics board to greatly reduce the time it takes to solve complex visualization problems.

For more information about the full lineup, visit NVIDIA.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.