NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M vs NVIDIA Quadro FX 380M vs NVIDIA Quadro FX 3600M

NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M

The NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M is a professional middle class graphics card for mobile workstations (about 15"). It is based on the GeForce GT 330M graphics card with slower clock rates and therefore is a DirectX 10.1 chip that is produced in 40nm. 

Due to a special BIOS and professional drivers, the FX 880M should perform noticeably better than a 330M in professional applications (like CAD, DCC, Rendering). Another advantage for professional users are the certified drivers that should ensure a bug free experience with the most common professional applications. Futhermore, the Quadro FX drivers contain profiles for these applications to ensure the best settings (similar to the game profiles in GeForce cards).

The Quadro FX 880M is also based on the GT216 core in 40nm. The shaders are based on the desktop GTX 200 architecture and therefore a bit improved compared to the previous generation cards.

Without load, the Quadro FX 880M is able to downclock to 135 / 270 / 135 MHz (chip / shader / memory clock).

The gaming performance of the FX 880M should be beyond the GT 330M, because of the different drivers. Gamers should choose a GeForce card because of the better game support.

The chip supports Optimus for automatic switching between dedicated and integrated graphics card (e.g. in the new Core i5 CPUs). Still Optimus was for example not integrated in the Lenovo Thinkpad W510.

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.