nVidia intro's 8 GPU Quadro system

[mpjesse]

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/08/01/nvidia_quadro_plex_1000/

Cool stuff. It's basically a visual supercomputer.

 

[prozac26]

Meh.

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

nV's press release;

http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_34527.html

Sounds like targeting geomatic and similar heavy duty 2D/3D modeling.

Also sounds like they're targeting real-time video editing like Matrox, but they would be providing components for proffesional large system builders like Chyron.

 

[mpjesse]

Have you ever seen those oil and natural gas exploration visual systems? They are nothing short of amazing. It's all done with VR now. I saw a brief documentary on it on Discovery or something.

 

[voxel]

It's basically a visual supercomputer.

Yep. Until yesterday I thought it was overkill, but a proposed project landed on my lap that could use two of these (8 + 8 with SLI is the max configuration). $17,500 per node isn't shabby either.

 

[Dew4Travis]

Alright....I am hoping you all can help answer an argument for me.
Some people are trying to say that if you were to use this machine would be HORRIBLE for gaming! Meaning...if you were to use this as your video card to play any game on the market today, it would suck and be outperformed by any video card on the market today.
Now, please be nice...but I do not know how game developers utilize the hardware, but is it different than video editing?
I just don't see if this machine can do to video, and 3d rendering....why it would not perform just as well playing a game? I always thought video editing was way more taxing on a video card than a game?
Am I wrong?

 

[mpjesse]

I always thought video editing was way more taxing on a video card than a game?
Am I wrong?

Yes and no. Comparing 3D CAD or Maya to a video game is like comparing apples to oranges.

From a purely hardware standpoint, this system would be able to do games just as well if not better. In most cases, Quadro chips and boards are nearly identical to gaming cards. The discriminating factor is those pesky Quadro drivers that you have to use.

HOWEVER.

Quadro based cards use their own drivers which are significantly different from their gaming counterparts. And these drivers SUCK at gaming.

So whoever you're arguing with is right, this system would probably not even be able to load a game.

 

[Dew4Travis]

Thank You very much for the info!!

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

Have you ever seen those oil and natural gas exploration visual systems? They are nothing short of amazing. It's all done with VR now. I saw a brief documentary on it on Discovery or something.

Yeah actually I've worked on a few projects for those systems impressive, and 'money's no object is the theme'. We play around with geomatic software packages for the wire/fibre stuff here at work, but I don't do that work anymore, that was a few years back when I did more network design.

I have 2 friends who work here the patch (well the HQ for the patch) and everytime they get new computers they invite me over and say "Is this good? How good is it? What does it cost in 'REAL money'?" what do you think of this? Dual Xeon / Quadro based multi-monitor desktops, and upgraded almost every year (probably an 18-24 month contract or something). Ahh to be owned by an Oil company. 8)



Edit an from the other post (a reply in general not directed at you as I'm sure you know this);

From a purely hardware standpoint, this system would be able to do games just as well if not better. In most cases, Quadro chips and boards are nearly identical to gaming cards. The discriminating factor is those pesky Quadro drivers that you have to use.

Yeah and sometimes they have features that are more important to certain functions than to gaming, like in this case the GENLOCK allows you to synch video which uses the slight cadence difference of NTSC and output a correct signal for broadcasting, which allows you to edit stuff on the fly witout there appearing to be a frame skip, etc, which is a slightly tough task, but not even remotely useful for gaming. Also processing effects realtime is extremely hard, and in this case you want something that can do it without the input of the CPU or HD, on the fly stuff like this is hard because there is no real pre-instruction or optimization because it's all NEW live imput/output.
Sure the hardware would be great for gaming, but in order to optimize it and get it to work, likely not worth the effort. I would need to look at the specs, but for durability/reliability I wouldn't be surprsed if these things are much slower than a GF7900GT and thuys likely 4 of them would be slower than 2 GX2s, and I doubt you'd even get much worthwhile imporvement in gaming in SLi beyond that 4th card,, probaly the 5,6,7,8th cards would add maybe 7,5,3,1% imporvement respectively if that.

 

[Guest]

Looks neat, but the big question is

- will it play Oblivion?

 

[theaxemaster]

Looks neat, but the big question is

- will it play Oblivion?

Yes, but only on medium settings.

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

... and still no HDR+AA. :twisted: