Quadro

Quadro was Nvidia's brand for graphics cards intended for use in workstations running professional computer-aided design (CAD), computer-generated imagery (CGI), digital content creation (DCC) applications, scientific calculations and machine learning from 2000 to 2020.

Quadro-branded graphics cards differed from the mainstream GeForce lines in that the Quadro cards included the use of ECC memory, larger GPU cache, and enhanced floating point precision. These are desirable properties when the cards are used for calculations which require greater reliability and precision compared to graphics rendering for video games.

The Nvidia Quadro product line directly competed with AMD's Radeon Pro (formerly FirePro/FireGL) line of professional workstation graphics cards.

Nvidia has since moved away from the Quadro branding for new products, starting with the Turing architecture-based RTX 4000 released on November 13, 2018, and then phasing it out entirely with launch of the Ampere architecture-based RTX A6000 on October 5, 2020. To indicate the upgrade to the Nvidia Ampere architecture for their graphics cards technology, Nvidia RTX is the product line being produced and developed moving forward for use in professional workstations. This branding lasted until the beginning of the Blackwell architecture era in 2025, when the workstation graphics card line was rebranded to RTX PRO in order to distinguish it further from the gaming-oriented GeForce RTX line.

History

The Quadro line of GPU cards emerged in an effort towards market segmentation by Nvidia. In introducing Quadro, Nvidia was able to charge a premium for essentially the same graphics hardware in professional markets, and direct resources to properly serve the needs of those markets. To differentiate their offerings, Nvidia used driver software and firmware to selectively enable features vital to segments of the workstation market, such as high-performance anti-aliased lines and two-sided lighting, in the Quadro product. These features were of little value to the gamers that Nvidia's products already sold to, but their lack prevented high-end customers from using the less expensive products. The Quadro line also received improved support through a certified driver program.

There are parallels between the market segmentation used to sell the Quadro line of products to workstation (DCC) markets and the Tesla line of products to engineering and HPC markets.

In a settlement of a patent infringement lawsuit between SGI and Nvidia, SGI acquired rights to speed-binned Nvidia graphics chips which they shipped under the VPro product label. These designs were completely separate from the SGI Odyssey based VPro products initially sold on their IRIX workstations which used a completely different bus. SGI's Nvidia-based VPro line included the VPro V3 (Geforce 256), VPro VR3 (Quadro), VPro V7 (Quadro2 MXR), and VPro VR7 (Quadro2 Pro).

Quadro SDI Actual extra cards only for Quadro 4000 cards and higher:

SDI Capture: SDI Output:

Quadro Plex

Quadro Plex consists of a line of external servers for rendering videos. A Quadro Plex contains multiple Quadro FX video cards. A client computer connects to Quadro Plex (using PCI Express ×8 or ×16 interface card with interconnect cable) to initiate rendering.

Quadro SLI and Sync

Scalable Link Interface, or SLI, has been considered as the next generation of Plex. Originally used for the GeForce line of graphics cards, it is a multi-GPU technology that uses two or more video cards to produce a single output. SLI can improve Frame Rendering and FSAA. Quadro SLI supports Mosaic technology for multiple displays using two cards in parallel and up to 8 possible monitors. Most cards have an SLI bridge slot for up to four cards on one motherboard. With Quadro Sync technology, cards can support up to a maximum of 16 possible monitors (using four cards in parallel).

Nvidia has four types of SLI bridges:

Standard Bridge (400 MHz Pixel Clock and 1 GB/s bandwidth) LED Bridge (540 MHz Pixel Clock) High-Bandwidth Bridge (650 MHz Pixel Clock) PCI-e lanes only reserved for SLI

In both SLI and SYNC technologies, acceleration of scientific calculations is possible with CUDA and OpenCL.

Quadro VCA

Nvidia supports SLI and supercomputing with its 8-GPU Visual Computing Appliance. Nvidia Iray, Chaosgroup V-Ray and Nvidia OptiX accelerate Raytracing for Maya, 3DS Max, Cinema4D, Rhinoceros and others. All software with CUDA or OpenCL, such as ANSYS, NASTRAN, ABAQUS, and OpenFoam, can benefit from VCA. The DGX-1 is available with 8 GP100 Cards.

Quadro RTX

The Quadro RTX series is based on the Turing microarchitecture, and features real-time raytracing. This is accelerated by the use of new RT cores, which are designed to process quadtrees and spherical hierarchies, and speed up collision tests with individual triangles. The Turing microarchitecture debuted with the Quadro RTX series before the mainstream consumer GeForce RTX line.

The raytracing performed by the RT cores can be used to produce reflections, refractions and shadows, replacing traditional raster techniques such as cube maps and depth maps. Instead of replacing rasterization entirely, however, the information gathered from ray-tracing can be used to augment the shading with information that is much more physically correct, especially regarding off-camera action.

Tensor cores further enhance the image produced by raytracing, and are used to de-noise a partially rendered image.

RTX is also the name of the development platform introduced for the Quadro RTX series. RTX leverages Microsoft's DXR, OptiX and Vulkan for access to raytracing.

Turing is manufactured using TSMC's 12 nm FinFET fabrication process. Quadro RTX also uses GDDR6 memory from Samsung Electronics.

Video cards GeForce Many of the Quadro line of video cards use the same GPU cores as Nvidia's consumer-and-gaming-oriented GeForce brand of video cards. The cards that are nearly identical to the desktop cards can be modified to identify themselves as the equivalent Quadro card to the operating system, allowing optimized drivers intended for the Quadro cards to be installed on the system. While this may not offer all of the performance of the equivalent Quadro card, it can improve performance in certain applications, but may require installing the MAXtreme driver for comparable speed.

The performance difference comes in the firmware controlling the card. Given the importance of speed in a game, a system used for gaming can shut down textures, shading, or rendering after only approximating a final output—in order to keep the overall frame rate high. The algorithms on a CAD-oriented card tend rather to complete all rendering operations, even if that introduces delays or variations in the timing, prioritising accuracy and rendering quality over speed. A Geforce card focuses more on texture fillrates and high framerates with lighting and sound, but Quadro cards prioritize wireframe rendering and object interactions.

Desktop AGP Architecture Celsius (NV1x): DirectX 7, OpenGL 1.2 (1.3) Architecture Kelvin (NV2x): DirectX 8 (8.1), OpenGL 1.3 (1.5), Pixel Shader 1.1 (1.3) Architecture Rankine (NV3x): DirectX 9.0a, OpenGL 1.5 (2.1), Shader Model 2.0a Architecture Curie (NV4x): DirectX 9.0c, OpenGL 2.1, Shader Model 3.0 Quadro_AGPModel Launch Core Core clock Memory clock(effective) Memory size Memory type Memorybandwidth Interface AGP 3-pinstereoconnector Monitor Output Near GeForce Model Notes Units MHz MHz MB GiB/s GeForce 256-based Quadro 2000-01-01 NV10GL (Celsius) 135 166 32 128-bit SDR 2.66 4× 1× VGA GeForce 256 GeForce 2-based Quadro2 Pro 2000-07-25 NV15GL 250 400 64 128-bit DDR 6.4 4× DVI, VGA, S-Video GeForce 2 GTS Quadro2 MXR 2000-07-25 NV11GL 200 183 32 128-bit SDR 2.93 4× 1× VGA GeForce 2 MX/400 Quadro2 MXR LP 2000-07-25 NV11GL 200 183 32 128-bit SDR2.93 4x 1× VGA GeForce 2 MX/400GeForce 3-based Quadro DCC 2001-03-14 NV20GL (Kelvin)200 230 64 128-bit DDR 7.3 4× DVI, VGA, S-Video GeForce 3/Ti GeForce 4-based Quadro4 380 XGL2002-11-12 NV18GL 275 513 64 128-bit DDR 8.2 8× DVI, VGA, S-Video GeForce 4 MX 440 (AGP 8×) Quadro4 500 XGL2002-02-19 NV17GL 250 166 128 128-bit SDR 2.66 4 x DVI GeForce 4 MX 420 Quadro4 550 XGL 2002-02-19 NV17GL 270 400 64 128-bit DDR 6.4 4× DVI GeForce 4 MX 440 Quadro4 580 XGL 2002-11-12NV18GL 300 400 64 128-bit DDR 6.4 8× DVI GeForce 4 MX 440 (AGP 8×) Quadro4 700 XGL 2002-02-19 NV25GL 275 550 64 128-bit DDR 7.2 4× 2× DVI, S-Video GeForce 4 Ti 4200 Quadro4 750 XGL 2002-02-19 NV25GL 275 550 128 128-bit DDR 7.2 4× 2× DVI, S-Video GeForce 4 Ti 4400 Quadro4 780 XGL 2002-11-12 NV28GL 275 550 128 128-bit DDR 8.8 4x 2× DVI, S-Video GeForce 4 Ti 4200 (AGP 8×) Quadro4 900 XGL2002-02-19 NV25GL 300 650 128 128-bit DDR 10.4 4× 2× DVI, S-Video GeForce 4 Ti 4600 Quadro4 980 XGL 2002-11-12 NV28GL 300 650 128 128-bit DDR 10.4 8× 2× DVI, S-Video GeForce 4 Ti 4800GeForce FX-based Quadro FX 5002003-05-21 NV34GL (Rankine) 270 243 128 128-bit DDR 7.7 8× DVI, VGA GeForce FX 5200 Quadro FX 700 2004-03-17 NV31GL 275 275 128 128-bit DDR 8.8 8× DVI, VGA GeForce FX 5600 Quadro FX 1000 2003-01-21 NV30GL 300 600 128 128-bit GDDR2 9.6 8× 2× DVI, S-Video GeForce FX 5800 Quadro FX 1100 2004-04-01NV36GL 425 325 128 128-bit DDR 10.4 8× 2× DVI, S-Video GeForce FX 5700 Quadro FX 2000 2003-01-21NV30GL 400 400 128 128-bit GDDR2 12.8 8× 2× DVI, S-Video GeForce FX 5800 Quadro FX 3000 2003-07-22 NV35GL 400 425 256 256-bit DDR 27.2 8× 2× DVI, S-Video GeForce FX 5900 Quadro FX 3000G 2003-07-22 NV35GL 400 425 256 256-bit DDR 27.2 8× 2× DL-DVI (via external controller), S-Video GeForce FX 5900 has external stereo frame sync connectorGeForce 6-based Quadro FX 4000 2004-04-01 NV40GL 375 500 256 256-bit GDDR3 32.0 8× 2× Dual-link DVI, S-Video GeForce 6800 GT 2nd link using external TMDS transmitter Quadro FX 4000 SDI 2004-04-19 NV40GL (Curie) 375 500 256 256-bit GDDR3 32.0 8× DVI, 2× SDI HDTV GeForce 6800 GTwith digital and analog genlock (using external controllers)

Desktop PCI Architecture Rankine (NV3x): DirectX 9.0a, OpenGL 1.5 (2.1), Shader Model 2.0a QuadroPCI Model Launch Core Core clock(MHz) Memory clock(effective) (MHz) Memory size(MB) Memory type Memorybandwidth(GB/s) 3-pinstereoconnector Monitor Output Near GeForce Model NotesGeForce FX-based Quadro FX 600 PCI 2004-03-17 NV34GL (Rankine) 270 480 128 128-bit DDR 7.8 2× DVI, S-Video GeForce 5200 Ultra

Desktop PCI Express

Quadro FX (without CUDA, OpenCL, or Vulkan) Rankine (NV3x): DirectX 9.0a, Shader Model 2.0a, OpenGL 2.1 Curie (NV4x, G7x): DirectX 9.0c, Shader Model 3.0, OpenGL 2.1