NVIDIA Quadro FX 770M vs NVIDIA Quadro FX 380M 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 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.

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.