NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800M vs NVIDIA Quadro FX 380M

NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800M

The NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800M is a upper mid-range professional graphics card for mobile workstations with about 15" displays. It is based on the same chip as the GeForce GT 335M but can be also equipped with fast GDDR5 graphics memory. The FX1800M is shipped with professional drivers and a special BIOS that improves the performance and stability in applications like CAD and DCC.

The certified drivers guarantee flawless and fast working with professional applications like Premiere, Photoshop, After Effect, AutoCAD, 3ds Max, trueSpace, Blender, Catia, IronCAD, Cinema 4D, Lightwave 3D, Softimage, Mathematica ... A list of all certified applications can be found on the Nvidia.com homepage. Compared to GeForce products, the Quadro FX cards offer a significantly better performance, especially for OpenGL based apps.

The gaming performance should be similar to the GeForce GT 335M, altough gamers should choose a GeForce graphics card because of the optimized driver support (that leads to a better performance and less problems in games). Still all modern and demanding games of 2009 should at least run in medium detail settings (see the GeForce GT 335M page for more gaming results).

The chip is manufactured in 40nm and offers 72 1-dimensional unified shaders. These can be compared to about 300-400 5-dimensional shaders in graphics cards by AMD. These processing cores can also be accessed with CUDA, OpenCL, and DirectCompute to use the calculation power for other tasks than rendering images (for example transcoding videos). 

The QuadroFX 1800M also supports PureVideo HD with the new VideoProcessor (VP4) to decode HD videos on the graphics card. This helps reducing CPU load and increasing battery runtimes.

The Quadro FX 1800M also supports the automatic switching between the integrated and dedicated graphics card using Optimus. First mobile workstations do not offer Optimus, as the development cycles of these laptops are very long.

NVIDIA Quadro FX 380M

The Nvidia Quadro FX 380M is a professional entry-level graphics card for mobile workstations. It is based on the GeForce 310M and therefore the 3D performance is not very good. Due to special drivers and optimizations, the performance for professional applications should be much better (than the 310M would perform). Another advantage are the certified drivers than ensure a good performance of professional applications without errors.

The card supports DirectX 10.1 and all the features of the G 310M (as it is based on the same GT218 core). Therefore PureVideo HD to decode HD videos with the graphics card is supported. The used Video Processor 4 (VP4) is able to fully decode H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2, and also MPEG-4 ASP (DivX or xVID) in hardware to minimize CPU load. MPEG-1 is not supported but can be easily handled by every modern CPU.

The gaming performance of the FX380M is similar to the GeForce 310M and therefore located in the entry level class. The professional drivers are however optimized for applications and may therefore deliver a worse performance. Modern 3D games like COD Modern Warfare 2 run only in low details and resolutions fluently. Some demanding games like NFS Shift or GTA4 wont run fluently at all. Less demanding games like SIMS 3 run in medium details and resolutions fluently. Therefore, the graphics card can not be recommended for gamers.

As the FX380M supports CUDA, DirectX Compute 10.1, and OpenCL, the shaders of the graphics processor can be used for other tasks than rendering images (e.g. faster encoding of videos).

The used GT218 core is manufactured in 40nm and based on the desktop GTX 200 architecture.