NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M vs NVIDIA Quadro NVS 150M

NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M

The NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M is a professional middle class graphics card for mobile workstations (about 15"). It is based on the GeForce GT 330M graphics card with slower clock rates and therefore is a DirectX 10.1 chip that is produced in 40nm. 

Due to a special BIOS and professional drivers, the FX 880M should perform noticeably better than a 330M in professional applications (like CAD, DCC, Rendering). Another advantage for professional users are the certified drivers that should ensure a bug free experience with the most common professional applications. Futhermore, the Quadro FX drivers contain profiles for these applications to ensure the best settings (similar to the game profiles in GeForce cards).

The Quadro FX 880M is also based on the GT216 core in 40nm. The shaders are based on the desktop GTX 200 architecture and therefore a bit improved compared to the previous generation cards.

Without load, the Quadro FX 880M is able to downclock to 135 / 270 / 135 MHz (chip / shader / memory clock).

The gaming performance of the FX 880M should be beyond the GT 330M, because of the different drivers. Gamers should choose a GeForce card because of the better game support.

The chip supports Optimus for automatic switching between dedicated and integrated graphics card (e.g. in the new Core i5 CPUs). Still Optimus was for example not integrated in the Lenovo Thinkpad W510.

NVIDIA Quadro NVS 150M

The Nvidia Quadro NVS 150M is a business graphics adapater for notebooks. It is based on the GeForce 9200M GS consumer graphics card but features special drivers which are optimized for business applications. A shor list of the applications which are certified for the NVS line can be found here (including MS Office, Exceed, Notes, McAffee, pcAnywhere, Bloomberg, Reuters, Tradestation).

The gaming performance should be similar to the GeForce 9200M GS and therefore only suited for less demanding games with low details. Still the business drivers are not optimized for games and may therefore show a worse performance (or some bugs). The memory is clocked either with 700 MHz (DDR3) or 400 MHz (DDR2) which is noticable slower.

Compared to the Quadro NVS 160M, the 150M features a slower clock speed and only supports resolutions up to 1680x1050 (digital) or 1600x1200 (analog).

As the 9200M GS, the Quadro NVS 150M also supports PureVideo HD to decode HD videos with the graphics chip (and save current).