NVIDIA Quadro

This year, as NVIDIA begins the rollout of the latest line of GeForce graphics cards, we at ProStar thought it would be a good time to send a salute to the unsung hero of the professional graphics world, the Nvidia Quadro card (K1100M, K3100M and K5100M).

The NVIDIA corporation introduced the Quadro cards with a special goal in mind: provide a workhorse counterpart to the increasingly popular “gaming” graphics cards, the GeForce series.
By “workhorse” just what are we talking about here? Simply put, it was designed to provide for all the sectors of industry that require graphical power for non-gaming programs.
NVIDIA made a couple smart moves to ensure that potential NVIDIA Quadro buyers would be enticed with features they simply could not get from a regular GeForce card.
First, the cards and were optimized to work with specific programs in mind. Taking aim at some of the mainstays of the professional graphics industry like AutoDesk, for example, the NVIDIA team tailored their drivers and hardware especially to work well with such programs, minimizing compatibility issues.
Though a goal of the NVIDIA GeForce (“gamer”) series of cards takes aim at compatibility with gaming software, the task of tailoring the drivers to optimize performance in specific games is daunting because games rotate in and out of popularity frequently and their development changes fairly rapidly.
The kinds of programs professionals use have long-standing histories of compatability with the NVIDIA Quadro hardware. Though CAD and other professional softwares are updated over time, they tend to remain more stable as pillars of their respective industries. Consider, for example, a program like AutoCAD which has been available as early as the 1980s. New versions of the popular program are still developed and released to this day and, while they are of course updated and improved, their longevity makes them a little more predictable than a game, which can go from a big seller to obsolete in as little as a year or two. This gives the architects of the professional graphics cards a great knowledge base to work with and helps prevent them having to “reinvent” the drivers and cards on a frequent basis.

We know NVIDIA has worked to keep their drivers innovative and current with the newest versions of popular animated design programs that come out each year, but there is more than just specialized drivers involved here, so what else makes the Quadro card unique?

For one thing, the designers of the card have invested a lot of time and effort into counteracting some of the problems that tend to appear when doing 3D design and rendering tasks, of which perhaps the greatest is aliasing.
As a quick definition, aliasing is when signals that are being sampled become indistinguishable from one another (hence they are “aliases” for each other). This misinformation of course causes the finished product to become garbled or distorted in some way.
A computer takes information generated within the design program and performs calculations with that data. As part of the process, the graphics card in the computer translates some of the data into images represented on the screen. If there are errors processing the data coming into the graphics card then it will, of course, put out a visual product with errors. This is the basic idea behind aliasing.
The NVIDIA designers put special effort into the Quadro card with a couple of technologies designed to combat just such problems. One is called advanced temporal anti-aliasing (TXAA) and the other fast approximate anti-aliasing (FXAA).
The first technology uses a combination of different techniques to reduce the appearance of “flickering” images and jerky movements of objects that are supposed to be moving smoothly in animated design programs.
The second (FXAA) is an algorithm that is aimed at smoothing out the edges of rendered images that would otherwise appear very jagged and distorted. It adds a “smoothness” effect to objects that might appear with much sharper or more distorted edges than intended.
Though these innovations might sound very simple, they actually relieve a massive problem that many designers face in engineering and architectural situations where an accurate representation of their finished product is crucial. The algorithms and methods which NVIDIA pioneered years ago to make these anti-flickering and smoothing effects possible set standards in the industry that are still used today.

The current Quadro cards work on current Kepler architecture, which is the same one used by the standard GeForce cards. Soon, GeForce will be moving on to the improved Maxwell architecture and a few GPUs have already gotten that treatment. For the time being, Quadro will be staying with Kepler, and make the move to newer architecture a little later on.
Currently, all the most popular mobile Quadro cards available, including the entry K1100m, midrange K3100m, and high-powered K5100m all utilize GDDR 5 video memory

A question many consumers pose in the Quadro versus GeForce debate is about the overlap between the two cards. In short: can you game on Quadro or CAD on GeForce?

The easy answer is “yes,” many CAD programs can run with GeForce graphics cards, however the more intensive the rendering (such as in complex aerodynamic design) the more the GeForce untits are at a disadvantage and the greater the necessity for the specialized Quadro drivers and technologies.
The same is generally true for gaming on Quadro. These cards are specialized for anti-aliasing and two-sided lighting effects (to name only a couple) which come in very handy with 3D design work, however they’re definitely capable of running computer games. If you’re looking for an easy reference, the Quadro K1100m (currently an industry standard for mobile entry-level Quadro cards) is roughly comparable to a GeForce 740m mobile graphics card. There are, of course, differences but benchmarks in testing programs such as 3DMark 11, Vantage, 06, 06 and 03 have all yielded similar scores.
When we jump up a level to the MVIDIA Quadro K3100m, we see results comparable to the GeForce 765m. Most games released as of 2013 will run fine on “high” settings with the K3100m, proving that these cards are no slouches when it comes to non-specialized or non-professional applications.

A great first step in determining if you need a Quadro is to check the requirements and product information of your programs. This sounds pretty obvious, but a surprising number of prospective Quadro buyers don’t know, when asked, if the software they’re going to use is one of the two-hundred plus programs specialized to work with Quadro. These cards are one of the few pieces of hardware that has such a huge number of companies which give their programs certification for it, so it’s worth checking the literature on the programs you’ll be using. More often than not, you’ll find it has Quadro certification.
If you know your software is made to work with Quadro but still have doubts, check with other people who have similar software requirements. Engineering students, for example, wondering if they really need to spring for a high-powered Quadro (usually they don’t) will often be okay in entry-level classes with basic Quadro cards or the more powerful GeForce cards. br: Students and professionals in aerodynamic design, however, will find that the requirements and testimonials for the programs they’ll be using indicate their programs are not only certified to work with Quadro, but they’re the recommended hardware for the job. A situation in which a program cannot run on a computer that is around two to years old may also be a clue that a specialized card will be required in the future when upgrading to a new computer.
Many CAD and design programs have low system requirements which can be met easily by computers that are 3 or 4 years old (keep in mind this is a generalization). Some, however, will tax even a fairly late model computer greatly and, if an upgrade to new hardware is necessary, it might be good to look into a Quadro card.
All in all, Quadro has made a great name for itself and survived for many years and subsequent releases as a mainstay of the industry despite being a piece of “specialty hardware,” which is a testament to its versatility and the large fanbase of loyal users it has won over.

With great excitement, ProStar computers has introduced the K1100M, K3100M and K5100M into its newest line of laptops. The heavyweight champion of mobile graphics processing has been made available in all of ProStar’s gaming series (in addition to a vast array of other graphics cards) and can now be ordered on:
All P150SM-A, P153SM-As, P157SM AND P159SMS-AS Laptops (K1100M and K3100M)

All P170SM-A, P173SM-AS, and P177SM-A Laptops (K1100M and K3100M)

And the ProStar flagship model, the P570WM Laptop (K5100M)

For more specifications and detailed information on these high-performance gaming and professional machines, please visit our site or give one of our wonderful sales representatives a call. For every one of our laptops, navigating to the More Info link provided on our company site provides a detailed description of the computer and its capabilities as well as image galleries, specifications and customization options. Visit us today on the web at www.pro-star.com or contact us via phone at 888-576-6776