NVIDIA Quadro FX 3600M vs NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800M

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 3800M

The NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800M is a mobile workstation graphics card for high end laptops. It is based on the Geforce GTX 280M core (G92 core) and features 128 CUDA cores (unified shaders).

Compared to the Quadro FX 3700M, the Quadro FX 3800M features a higher clock speed and is manufacturered in 55nm (compared to 65nm of the 3700M). In fact, the FX3800M is clocked even higher than the consumer GeForce GTX 280M and performs notably better as a result.

The Quadro FX series of cards are optimized for professional applications like CAD or DCC. Notably, OpenGL performance should be much improved compared to  consumer GeForce cards of similar specifications.

At the time its announcement (December 2009), the FX 3800M was the fastest workstation graphics card for laptops.