Quadro4 900 XGL: Nvidia's professional-grade accelerator.(Evaluation)

IN A SHORT time, Nvidia's graphics technology has become a staple for content creators and 3D animators. The company's cards are reasonably priced and perform well. Still, until now, most of its professional cards have simply been faster versions of the consumer cards. But with the introduction of the GeForce4 chipset, Nvidia has taken the professional line in a new direction.

The cards come in three flavors. The Quadro4 900 XGL reviewed here is the top-of-the-line card, with 128MB of RAM. The Quadro4 750 XGL is a little slower, but also has 128MB of RAM. The Quadro4 700 XGL is the same as the 750, but with 64MB of onboard RAM. The company also ships the NVS line of Quadro cards, which are geared toward multiple display applications such as video editing.

The Nvidia 900 XGL reviewed here is not available through retail channels. Instead, it comes bundled with workstations from vendors such as HP, IBM, and Dell. Almost identical versions of the card are available through PNY, which has taken over the Quadro line from recently bankrupt Elsa.

With the Quadro4 series, Nvidia seems to be branching off from the consumer cards. Unlike previous versions of Quadros, which were almost identical to the company's consumer cards, the Quadro4 cards use a different chipset with a higher transistor count. While the Quadros have all the same features of the GeForce4, the Quadro4 cards include additional OpenGL functions not found in the consumer GeForce4 cards, such as hardware overlay and clipping planes.

The 900 XGL takes up a standard AGP slot and is about the length of the card cage. The card's fan is hefty, because the Quadro can get warm when put through its paces--typical of high-end graphics cards. If you have room in the case, it's best to keep the first PCI slot open so the card gets circulation.

Along the back of the card are two DVI connectors for LCD displays, which can also be used to connect analog VGA monitors using an adapter. All the Quadro4 cards support multiple displays. And on most multiple display cards, elements such as popup dialog boxes get split across both screens, making them hard to decipher. To avoid this, Nvidia provides a utility called nView, which allows you to manage the way dialog boxes appear on the screen. Dialogs can be constrained to a ...