The NVIDIA Quadro FX 3500M was the top professional graphic solution for the mobile use in 2007. The Quadro FX 3500M is especially suitable for CAD, digital image-, video editing and scientifical visualizations (according NVIDIA). It is based upon the NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950GTX. Therefore also a good gaming performance can be expected (for 2007 and if modded drivers are used). The card is shipped with certified drivers for professional applications, which are not optimized for games (inofficially the manual installation of Forceware drivers should be possible).
The drivers of the Quadro FX series are certified for CAD applications (e.g. AutoCad, Inventor, Solidstation, Solud Edge, ...) and DCC applictions (e.g. Maya, 3DS Max, Lightwave 3D, ...) and offers a 12-Bit precision for Subpixel, full image Antialiasing, hardware accelerated Antialiasing for dots and lines and additional optimized settings, which are optimized for CAD and DCC.
Nvidia describes the 3000 series as a power package for big laptops and data structures.
The Nvidia GeForce GT 330M is the successor of the GT 230M and technically a faster clocked GT 240M (but it should still maintain the power envelope of the GT 230M as the naming suggests). Therefore, the GT330M is a mid-range laptop graphics card that offers DirectX 10.1 effects.
The performance of the GT 330M is similar to the GeForce GT 240M and therefore located in the range of the Mobility Radeon HD 4650. The card supports DirectX 10.1 and all the features of the GT 230M / 240M (as it is based on the same GT216 core). The modern ATI Radeon HD 5650 offers DirectX 11 effects and performs better.
Modern and demanding DirectX 10 and 11 games (like Crysis or Risen) can only be played fluently with medium detail settings and resolution settings. Less demanding games like Sims 3 run in high details and resolutions. See the gaming list below for detailed benchmarks.
The 48 shader cores of the GT216 are based on the desktop GTX 200 architecture and are therefore a bit improved compared to the 48 cores of the GeForce 9700M GTX. According to Nvidia, the micro architecture was improved regarding battery runtime and performance. The stream processors / shaders are 1-dimensional (1D) and can therefore not directly compared to the 5D shaders of current AMD / ATI cards like the Mobility Radeon HD 5650.
To use the calculation performance of the GeForce GT 330M for other applications, the card supports CUDA, OpenCL, and Direct Compute. For example encoding videos using the stream processors is considerably faster than using a fast CPU.
The GT330M supports the hardware decoding of HD videos using the integrated PureVideo HD engine. The integrated VP4 video processor is able to fully decode H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4 ASP (e.g., DivX, xVID). Hardware decoding of MPEG-1 encoded videos is not supported, but this can be handled by every CPU without high load. In conjunction with an Core i5-520M, the GT 330M decoded H.264 with 1-6%, VC1 in 5-10%, and WMV with 3-9% CPU load (1080p over HDMI on a Sony Vaio Z11).
As with the GT 230M, the performance depends on the used graphics memory. With slow DDR2, the card can be up to 20% slower than with faster memory. Usually the GT 330M is paired with cheap and relatively fast DDR3 memory. GDDR3 would be a bit faster. GDDR5 is not supported according to Nvidia.
A low power version of the GT 330M is also available for laptop manufacturers featuring a minimal slower clock rate and less power consumption (Codename N11P-LP).
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.
Average Benchmarks NVIDIA Quadro FX 3500M → 100%n=2
Average Benchmarks NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M → 115%n=2
Average Benchmarks NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M → 117%n=2
- Range of benchmark values for this graphics card - Average benchmark values for this graphics card * Smaller numbers mean a higher performance 1 This benchmark is not used for the average calculation
Game Benchmarks
The following benchmarks stem from our benchmarks of review laptops. The performance depends on the used graphics memory, clock rate, processor, system settings, drivers, and operating systems. So the results don't have to be representative for all laptops with this GPU. For detailed information on the benchmark results, click on the fps number.
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- Average benchmark values for this graphics card
