NVIDIA Quadro FX 770M vs NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800M vs NVIDIA Quadro FX 3600M

NVIDIA Quadro FX 770M

The Quadro FX 770M is a professional midrange graphics adapter for laptops / mobile workstations. The GPU is optimized for professional 2D and 3D applications like CAD, DCC, and visualization software. The FX770M solutions contains certified graphics drivers for the most popular applications.

The GPU chip of the Quadro FX770M is based on the GeForce 9600M GT consumer card for notebooks. Therefore, the Quadro has the same features (like the PureVideo HD video-processor) as the 9600M GT.

The performance of the card should be compareable to the 9600M GT. Still some games may run slower, as the drivers are optimized for applications and OpenGL. Especially the OpenGL performance is way better than with an 9600M GT. The Cinebench R10 OpenGL test shows up to twize the performance with a FX 770M compared to a GeForce 9600M GT.

As all cards of the GeForce 9000M series, the 770M support CUDA.

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 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.