NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800: 4GB on a Graphics Card

NVIDIA has announced its new workstation graphics card called Quadro FX 5800. The big novelty: 4GB of video memory on board. Oh, it’s not going to make your games much faster as most consumer applications don’t use that much memory, however for those working on serious things like finding the next billion barrels of oil, simulating wind power generation or looking inside your heart the additional memory can become invaluable to avoid costly memory swapping.

Most of you know its cousin, the GTX 280 with which it shares most of the architectural traits, like having 240 stream processors. If you wonder, the main difference between GeForce and Quadro cards reside in the driver optimizations. Quadro chips are also selected from the “best” chips that have passed a more rigourous testing process.