NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M vs NVIDIA Quadro FX 3600M vs NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800M

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 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.