Nvidia Introduces Quadro FX 5800 Graphics Board for Professional Market

by , 5:20 PM EST, November 11th, 2008

Graphics card manufacturer Nvidia announced on Tuesday that it has released its Quadro FX 5800 graphics board. The 5800, which is designed for the professional graphics market as opposed to the gaming market, boasts 4 gigabytes of VRAM, 240 processor cores, supports the stereo DP and Dual Link DVI connection protocols and a carries $3,500 price tag.

The Quadro FX 5800 is designed to tap into the parallel processing power of its cores to crunch massive amounts of data without overloading the primary processor(s) within a computer. The card also boasts a memory bandwidth of 102 gigabytes per second, has a fill rate of 52 billion texture elements (texels) per second and can draw 300 million triangles per second per the company's posted technical specifications.

Designed for use in financial modeling, medical imaging, and exploration for oil and gas, the Quadro FX5800 's 240 processor cores can be programmed using Nvidia's Cuda C-language development environment and tools. The Quadro FX 5800 boards are currently available from PNY Technologies in the U.S. and Europe, Elsa in Japan, and Leadtek in the rest of Asia.

As of now, Nvidia has yet to publish information as to what operating systems are supported by the 5800. We have asked Nvidia for confirmation on whether this card will include Mac OS X support and will immediately update this article when the company responds.