Quadro DCC: Nvidia's GeForce 3 with extras. (reviews).(Evaluation)

OVER THE PAST few years, Nvidia has become the dominant force in 3D graphics processors. The company has been pushing the envelope in terms of price and performance to the point where the line between professional and consumer cards has become gray indeed. With the introduction of the Quadro DCC line of cards, Nvidia has pushed the high end of its product line even further.

The Quadro line got its start last year with cards promising superior performance and features over Nvidia's consumer cards. Previous Quadros were extensions of the GeForce 2 chipset, while the current Quadro DCC (Digital Content Creation) card is an enhanced version of the GeForce 3 chipset, introduced last year. For the retail channel, Elsa exclusively distributes these cards under the Gloria DCC name, but Nvidia also produces a line of OEM cards that manufacturers such as Dell and HP bundle with their machines. The graphics board reviewed here is the Nvidia version.

On the surface, the Quadro DCC looks nearly identical to the GeForce 3 card I reviewed last year (see pg. 60, September 2001). There are the same green heatsinks covering 64MB of DDR RAM, as well as a hefty fan to cool the main chipset. The card sports both a DVI and VGA connector to support LCD or analog monitors. Only one of these connectors can be active at a time. The Quadro MXR card Nvidia produced last year supported dual monitors on the card by using a DVI-to-analog converter cable. It would have been nice to extend this functionality to the current line of cards.

The specs of the accelerator are virtually identical to the GeForce3's. Both cards have essentially the same core, such as a 350MHZ RAMDAC and 64MB of 128-bit DDR memory. Clock rates are also the same. The big difference is in software support. The DCC has additional OpenGL and DirectX 8 extensions so that the cards perform better under high-end 3D applications such as Discreet's 3ds max and Alias|Wavefront's Maya.

One nice addition to the software is the inclusion of Elsa's Maxtreme drivers for 3ds max, which have been purchased by Nvidia so that anyone using a Quadro-based card can use them. I really like the Maxtreme drivers, as they offer max users many additional features on top of max's standard OpenGL drivers, allowing you to optimize the viewports for speed or quality. The drivers support three levels of transparency, and five levels of texture mapping. Higher quality texture mapping means slower speed. The coolest feature is the ...