The NVIDIA Quadro FX 3000
NV35GL Based Pro Graphics

By: Dave Altavilla
September 10, 2003

For testing and benchmark purposes, we configured a 3GHz Pentium 4 machine, in an Intel i875 based motherboard set up with an 800MHz system bus.  We set our 1Gig of Kingston HyperX 3500 DDR RAM to optimal 2, 2, 2, 5 timings at DDR400 speeds.  Also, since many of our readers have asked for this comparison, we've included scores from a GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, which is roughly the equivalent consumer graphics card to the Quadro FX 3000.  Again, as we noted before, there are reportedly very distinct differences between NVIDIA's Consumer and Pro Graphics GPUs and the following benchmarks will most likely prove that out.

HotHardware Test System and Setup A Top End Pentium 4 Workstation

NVIDIA Quadro FX 3000 - Driver Version 44.71
NVIDIA Quadro FX 2000 - Driver Version 44.71
(NVIDIA MAXtreme driver for 3D Studio Max version 4.00.29)
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra - Driver Version 44.71
ATi FireGL X1 - Driver Version 6.13.10.1036
Pentium 4 Processor at 3.0GHz (800MHz FSB)
Motherboard and RAM Config
DFI LAN Party 875Pro - i875P Canterwood Motherboard
1GB of Kingston HyperX PC3500 CAS 2 RAM
Other Hardware and Software:
Western Digital Caviar WD1200 SE 120G HD
Windows XP Professional SP1
Intel Release Chipset Driver  v5.00.1012
DirectX 9.0b
 

SPECapc For SolidWorks 2003 A 3D CAD Designers Heavy Duty Tool

SPECapc for SolidWorks 2003 is a benchmark module designed to showcase a given test system's performance in everyday design scenarios that a CAD Designer may encounter using SolidWorks tools.  There are a number of large complex models rendered in various test runs, the largest of which exceeds over 3 million vertices.

We should point out that we took the graphics specific times for this test, rather than the normalized weighted mean that the benchmark likes to calculate, which includes processor and other IO function performance.  Since we're focusing on isolating the graphics subsystem in this test, we felt it was more relevant to work with only the time to complete the graphics test.  As we can see here the Quadro FX 3000 is only slightly ahead of the Quadro 2000 but manages to ace out the FireGL X1 considerably, with about a 9% edge in the time it took to complete this test.

SPECapc For 3D Studio Max 4.2.6 THE 3D Graphics Design and Animation Tool Suite

Although our upcoming SPECviewperf benchmark also tests performance in 3D Studio Max, viewperf doesn't go into the kind of depth that the SPECapc version of the test does.  In fact, viewperf uses 3DS Max version 3.1 for its testing as well as a somewhat less complex rendering workload.  Scenes like the one below, are rendered with different particle systems and light sources.  These are good examples of more complex scenarios that are represented in this benchmark, versus the viewperf tests.

                         Composite Test, Higher Scores Are Faster
                 

First an explanation of the "fastest" and "quality" scores represented in the Quadro FX numbers.  For this test, we utilized NVIDIA's MAXtreme driver for 3D Studio Max.  The driver has two settings of "quality" and "speed".  Under the fastest settings, texture detail is relaxed somewhat and texture compression is turn on.  In the "quality" setting texture detail is set to maximum and compression is turned off, while line anti-aliasing is enabled.

Regardless, clearly the Quadro FX 3000 dominates the test, with a 5 - 7% lead over the Quadro FX 2000 and a crushing 84% lead over the FireGL X1.  Again, it's hard to compare the ATi card and the Quadro FX 3000 however.  The retail cost of a FireGL X1 falls more in line with a Quadro FX 1000 or 500, at around $500 street price and the Quadro FX 3000, as we've shown you earlier here, is a $2300 card.  However, as a relative performance metric, the X1 is all we have available from ATi at the moment for reference in this article.  While ATi's FireGL X2 is reportedly shipping, we have yet to get our hands on one.  Even then, the price points are still in a different class altogether and again a more comparable match-up for that card would be the Quadro FX 1000.
 

Gaming Performance?  Why not...  UT2003 and Q3