NVIDIA Quadro FX 3600M vs NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800M vs NVIDIA Quadro FX 3500M

NVIDIA Quadro FX 3600M

The NVIDIA Quadro FX 3600M is a professional graphics card for CAD, DCC and other modeling applications based upon the 8800M GTX consumer card (G92 architecture). It was a high-end card at the time of announcement. Certified drivers grant error-free and faster performance in professional applications. The FX 3600M was later succeeded by the more efficient 55nm FX 2800M and FX 3800M, both of which still utilize the G92 architecture.

The most important aspect of the Quadro FX 3600M is its use "Unified Shaders". There no longer exist any dedicated pixel or vertex shaders. Instead, the FX 3600M uses 64 so-called stream processors to handle most of the graphics work previously processed by pixel and vertex shaders. Furthermore, the shader units are clocked higher than the GPU core (1250 MHz).

The performance of the FX 3600M shoul be higher than the 1600M due to the 256 bit wide memory bus and the high number of Unified Shaders. According to Nvidia, the GPU is best suited for modelling large 3D scenes and complex models.

NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800M

The NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800M is a upper mid-range professional graphics card for mobile workstations with about 15" displays. It is based on the same chip as the GeForce GT 335M but can be also equipped with fast GDDR5 graphics memory. The FX1800M is shipped with professional drivers and a special BIOS that improves the performance and stability in applications like CAD and DCC.

The certified drivers guarantee flawless and fast working with professional applications like Premiere, Photoshop, After Effect, AutoCAD, 3ds Max, trueSpace, Blender, Catia, IronCAD, Cinema 4D, Lightwave 3D, Softimage, Mathematica ... A list of all certified applications can be found on the Nvidia.com homepage. Compared to GeForce products, the Quadro FX cards offer a significantly better performance, especially for OpenGL based apps.

The gaming performance should be similar to the GeForce GT 335M, altough gamers should choose a GeForce graphics card because of the optimized driver support (that leads to a better performance and less problems in games). Still all modern and demanding games of 2009 should at least run in medium detail settings (see the GeForce GT 335M page for more gaming results).

The chip is manufactured in 40nm and offers 72 1-dimensional unified shaders. These can be compared to about 300-400 5-dimensional shaders in graphics cards by AMD. These processing cores can also be accessed with CUDA, OpenCL, and DirectCompute to use the calculation power for other tasks than rendering images (for example transcoding videos). 

The QuadroFX 1800M also supports PureVideo HD with the new VideoProcessor (VP4) to decode HD videos on the graphics card. This helps reducing CPU load and increasing battery runtimes.

The Quadro FX 1800M also supports the automatic switching between the integrated and dedicated graphics card using Optimus. First mobile workstations do not offer Optimus, as the development cycles of these laptops are very long.

NVIDIA Quadro FX 3500M

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.