What's in the cards? Vendors of workstation graphics cards are dealing customers strong hands, but customers need to know which cards will put them on a winning streak.(Graphics Cards)

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Workstation graphics cards are always at the cutting edge of technology. Graphics professionals demand speed and speed and power for a simple reason--time is money, and faster graphics gets the job done faster. The latest workstation graphics cards sport faster chips, more memory, and, most recently, support for PCI Express 2, a faster hardware interface that gets data to the card even faster (see "The Express Way," September 2007).

High-end 3D graphics technology usually comes in two flavors of cards-those for gaming and those for workstations. While both share similar technology, their purposes are very different. Gaming cards are the razzle-dazzle cards, and are designed mostly to provide very high frame rates for gaming applications. Workstation cards are similarly speedy, but they focus more on accuracy and open standards, particularly supporting OpenGL. This is especially important for artists and professionals doing high-end work. Many high-end 3D applications, particularly Autodesk's Maya and Softimage's XSI, are built around OpenGL, so support for the API can be essential.

Workstation graphics cards these days are sold by two companies--ATI and Nvidia, both of which are extremely competitive. It seems as if these two companies are always running neck and neck in terms of performance, with the latest release from one company topping the previous release from another. Moreover, other companies, such as Matrox, sell workstation cards, but many of these are geared more toward 2D workstation tasks, such as those used in video editing. As for the main vendors, AMD sells its high-end 3D workstation cards as the ATI FireGL series, while Nvidia offers the Quadro series. Nevertheless, each company offers a wide array of cards, enabling customers to get as much power and capability as they need.

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The Express Lane

Current graphics cards are based on the PCI Express hardware interface, which replaced the venerable AGP interface a few years ago. All current motherboards support PCI Express, and, as of late last year, this interface has been updated to PCI Express 2, which doubles the bandwidth over the previous generation. Systems are now just filtering into the market with PCI Express 2 slots (which are completely compatible with older PCI Express cards).