NVIDIA Quadro CX Review :: Quadro CX Features

• Accelerate nested compositions
• Fast H.264 video encoding
• Dynamically adjust turbo noise features
• Accelerate cartoon effects
• Preview bilateral blur effects
• Multiple display options
• 1.5GB GDDR3 memory with
• CUDA
• 10-bit per component color fidelity
• Dual DisplayPort Digital Display connectors
• Single Dual-Link Digital Display Connector
• Quad Buffered Stereo
• NVIDIA SLI
• 8096x8096 maximum texture and render processing
• Fast 3D Texture Transfer
• 128-bit Precision Graphics Pipeline
• 30-bit color output via SDI connector
• 64-bit Floating Point Precision
• Advanced Color Compression, Early Z-Cull
• Cg HLSL
• Vista
• 32x FSAA
• External Sychronization
• NVIDIA Graphics API extensions
• Hardware 3D Window Clipping
• Hardware-Accelerated Pixel Read-Back
• Highest Workstation application performance
• 192 Shader Processors
• 384-bit memory interface
• 2-slots
• Microsoft DirectX 10.0
• Pixel Shader 4.0
• Vertex Shader 4.0
• OpenGL 3.0
• Genlock
• Maximum Power Consumption 150w
• Maximum DisplayPort Resolution 2560x1600
• G-Sync Version II
• 55nm
• 1.4 Billion Transistors
• RapiHD H.264 encoder
• 16 simultaneous 4096x1536 images open

If the specifications for the NVIDIA Quadro CX look familiar that is because the card is very similar to the Quadro 4600 which is the workstation equivalent of the GTX260 from NVIDIA. As you might know, graphics vendors tend to sell similar products for the workstation and consumer divisions, with differences primarily in the amount of memory used, the display interface, drivers that are tuned for applications like Photoshop and Premiere or After Effects.

The Quadro CX video card is a 1.4 Billion transistor chip which is the largest single chip transistor count for graphics chips on the market today. It is built on TSMC's 55 nanometer process. There are 192 Shader Processors on the chip. Note that this is the exact same process used on the GeForce GTX260 that was launched this year with 216 cores, but the CX has 192 processors. The Quadro CX has the same configuration exactly as the Quadro 4600 with the difference being the CUDA encoder RapiHD.

The Quadro CX can output 30-bit color via an optional SDI card to allow unmatched color control within Adobe After Effects and Premier Pro. SDI or Serial Digital Interface is the SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) broadcast video standard for transfer of uncompressed broadcast-quality video throughout a production environment including cameras, recorders and displays. This means that the Quadro CX is perfect for the video professional to use.

In terms of features, the card is fully DirectX 10.0 compliant including Pixel Shader 4.0, Vertex Shader 4.0 and OpenGL 3.0. NVIDIA was the first graphics card maker on the market to support DirectX 10.0 and OpenGL 3.0. In terms of Photoshop CS4, the requirements for the GPU accelerated features on the Quadro CX require OpenGL and are not specific to the Quadro CX and will work with any OpenGL video card. Enabling the features is as simple as going into the Performance section of the Preferences window and "Enabled OpenGL Drawing" be turned on.

The first feature is the zoom tool. This feature allows you to zoom out of a zoomed-in image quickly to change the position of the image and zoom into a different area. This is especially useful on a large image where zooming in and out required a thumbnail in the corner before. With GPU Zoom enabled, there's a Pixel Grid which defines the pixels. Without the Pixel Grid zooming in and out is hard due to the lack of accuracy. Continuous zooming is allowed with a GPU that supports it where without GPU acceleration you only zoom in one level at a time.

The second feature that is being touted by NVIDIA is the rotate feature. With this feature you can quickly and easily rotate images by clicking the rotate icon clicking the left mouse button allows you to rotate the image easily. Without GPU acceleration of this feature you are limited to entering the degree of rotation manually. Large images can take a long time to rotate in this manner and becomes larger. The resultant image then takes longer to rotate to the previous position as it is larger.

Bird's Eye View Zooming is a new feature for Photoshop CS4. In the past if you wanted to navigate in an image you would either have to zoom out and zoom back in to a new area, pan the image looking for the area of interest, or use the navigator window to view a smaller representation of the image to navigate. Bird's Eye View allows the user to instantly view the full screen image while the onscreen selection tool allows them to go to a different area of the image and return to the same zoom level at the new location. With the advent of digital cameras the size of the images are growing exponentially. Raw image files for a 24MP camera are huge at 3GB. Adobe developed the DNG file format for universal storage of raw image data from various cameras. NVIDIA uses the CUDA computing technology on their Quadro CX combined with OpenGL to process DNG images much faster than traditional CPUs. As image sizes get bigger, the longer it takes to modify the image and the graphics card is the perfect tool to do it faster rather than use the CPU.