NVIDIA Quadro 5010M

The NVIDIA Quadro 5010M is a professional workstation graphics card based on the Fermi architecture (GF100 chip). Therefore, the 5010M is closely related to the  consumer GeForce GTX 480M. The Quadro 5010M is the successor to the Quadro 5000M and also offers ECC RAM and double-precision floating point cores.

The Quadro series offers certified drivers that are optimized for stability and performance in professional applications like CAD, DCC, medicine, or visualisation areas. The OpenGL performance, for example, should be significantly better than GeForce graphics cards with similar specifications.

The shader / CUDA cores can be accessed using DirectX 11 or OpenGL 4.1 for graphics rendering and DirectCompute, OpenCL, AXE, and CUDA for general purpose calculations. Due to the new Fermi architecture, the 5010M should offer higher levels of performance in general purpose calculations compared to its predecessors.

Furthermore, the Nvidia Quadro 5010M is compatible with the new stereoscopic solution by Nvidia called 3D Vision Pro.

To automatically switch between the integrated graphics card and the Quadro, the 5010M supports Nvidia Optimus. Note, however, that whether this feature is integrated or not depends on the notebook manufacturer.

Similar to the GeForce GTX 480M, the Quadro 5010M is specified at 100 Watt TDP. As a result, only very large laptops, such as the Clevo D901F, are able to house this high-end card.

At the time of arrival (Feb. 2011), the Quadro 5010M succeeds the older Quadrio FX 5000M as the fastest professional workstation graphic card for laptops.