Nvidia Quadro FX3000: with its latest graphics accelerator, Nvidia caters to the high-end market.(Product/Service Evaluation)

Nvidia, a driving force in the consumer market for many years, is now becoming a huge player in the workstation market. Its Quadro series of graphics cards are popular with studios, and even the consumer-level GeForce cards work well in a number of professional applications. Nvidia is aggressively courting the high end with the Quadro FX3000, a robust card that now supports genlock.

The Quadro FX3000 is available as an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) part from Nvidia and is bundled with systems from vendors such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM. The new FX3000 also is offered though PNY in the retail channel. An OEM direct from Nvidia, the card I reviewed came with drivers for Windows and Linux. I installed the card on a Windows XP Professional machine with a 2.8GHZ processor and 2GB of RAM.

Opening the box revealed the FX3000 as a substantial piece of hardware. The heat sink is massive, and the card is double width, taking up both the AGP slot and the neighboring PCI slot on the system. Most of this extra room is needed for airflow and cooling, though the FX3000G uses some of the extra space for a daughterboard and the genlock connectors. The card's power requirements are fairly hefty, calling for power through not only the PCI slot, but also a standard 4-pin molex connector, the same type used on hard disk drives.

As with most Nvidia cards, the FX3000 supports dual monitors. The card contains two DVI connectors on the back for flat-panel monitors. A standard SVGA monitor can be connected with the supplied adapters. Dual-monitor operation is supported through Nvidia's nView control panel, which manages screen resolution and the way menus and dialog boxes behave over multiple displays. The FX3000 also can support single uXGA monitors with up to 3840x2400 resolution.

One of the bigger features of the FX3000 is the option to genlock the card, sold as the FX3000G. Genlock enables applications to sync multiple cards across multiple systems, which is important for applications that need more than two displays. This is terrific for creating multisystem reality centers used in collaborative engineering and design reviews. And the card can sync to standard video formats and to house-sync signals for video postprocessing and editing solutions, making it a perfect choice for real-time 3D broadcast applications.

At SIGGRAPH, Nvidia showed demos of high-quality images rendered in real time using its ...