NVIDIA Releases Powerful 4-GB Graphics Card

NVIDIA's new graphics card features a massively parallel processing architecture and 4 GB of RAM aimed at energy exploration, medical imaging and design applications -- and not at gamers. At a price tag of $3,499, NVIDIA's high-end product is targeting a select customer group with specific technology needs.

Professionals in oil exploration, medical diagnostics and product design wade through mountains of data to get their jobs done. The NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800 is geared toward turning that data into a form those professionals can comprehend, analyze and use to make decisions.

The card has up to 240 CUDA programmable parallel cores and 4 GB of graphics memory. In addition, it offers interactive 4-D modeling with time-lapse capabilities, massive memory bandwidth of up to 102 GB per second and fill rates that exceed 52 billion texels (texture elements) per second and geometry performance of 300 million triangles per second.

With true 10-bit color enabling billions -- rather than millions -- of color variations for rich, vivid image quality with broad, dynamic range, the Quadro FX 5800 appears to be an especially good fit for 3-D medical imaging.

Such applications typically process very large data sets from technology such as 64-slice CT scanners. Extreme bandwidth is necessary to support such cutting-edge technology.