NVIDIA Quadro NVS 150M vs NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M vs NVIDIA Quadro FX 3600M

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).

NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M

Performance workstation grafic chip with DirectX 10 support and OpenGL 2.1 support. Probaby, it bases upon the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT.

It is intended for digital content creators, engineers, geologic scientists and other professional 3D applications.

The drivers of the Quadro FX series are certified for CAD applications (e.g. AutoCad, Inventor, Solidstation, Solid Edge, ...) and DCC applications (e.g. Maya, 3DS Max, Lightwave 3D, ...) and offer a 12-bit precision for subpixel, full image-antialiasing, hardware accelerated antialiasing for dots and lines and additional drivers are for CAD and DCC optimized settings.

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.