Despite the economic turmoil in the technology industry, NVIDIA remains one of the largest and most well known of all graphics vendors. NVIDIA is more closely associated with consumer graphics cards for gaming PCs and notebooks, but the company is also well known in the business world for its line of Quadro graphics cards.
NVIDIA has announced a new video card in its Quadro line called the Quadro NVS 420. The NVS 420 is a quad-display graphics solution according to NVIDIA and will support four 30-inch displays with a resolution of 2560 x 1600 each.
The card uses a small form factor design with a low-profile bracket. NVIDIA says that the NVS 420 is the only low profile professional graphics solution in the industry that will allow high resolutions on multiple monitors.
Jeff Brown, GM of Professional solutions at NVIDIA said in a statement, "The convenience of small form factor computers can now finally be matched with remarkable business graphics and digital display capabilities. The Quadro NVS 420 transforms these small form factor machines into business graphics powerhouses."
Other features the NV 420 includes is new nView display software that allows users to spread screen content across single or multiple displays with a desktop management application that promises easy use. The software displays gridlines to allow users to divide the desktop into multiple regions.
Also supported are virtual desktops that allow users to launch applications on up to 32 different desktops. The Windows Taskbar is also spanned across multiple monitors allowing the application buttons to be spread over the displays as well.
NVIDIA says that the video card features a large frame buffer and provides the performance needed for digital signage solutions. The display channel on the card is a single VHDCI connector and 16 CUDA parallel processing cores are used.
Total memory size for the card is 512MB with each GPU getting 256MB of memory. The memory interface totals 128-bit with each GPU getting 64-bit of that number. NVIDIA promises memory bandwidth of 11.2GB/s per GPU.
Microsoft DirectX 10 is supported along with OpenGL 2.1 and shader model 4.0. Total connectivity options include four DVI-D and four DisplayPort. The card is green as well with a maximum power consumption of 40W. The video card supports both 2D and 3D graphics as well as HD video content.
EnergyStar compliance ensures that the card has low max power and idle power requirements and the NVS 420 uses a variable speed fan to reduce noise in the work environment. NVIDIA's dedicated enterprise support team is available to help with any problems or issues with the card.
Availability for the NVS 420 is set for February at $499. NVIDIA also recently introduced a pair of new consumer graphics cards at CES 2009 called the GTX 295 and GTX 285. The GTX 295 is a dual-GPU card and offers 240 shaders. The 295 is nowhere near as power efficient as the NVS 420. The GTX 295 draws 289W of power under full load.