The Quadro Plex 2200 is housed in an aesthetic tower, also referred to as a dedicated desk-side visual computing system (VCS).  The breakthrough machine offers professional visual computing power that enhances image quality, facilitates dynamic product scaling, and adds to the arsenal of NVIDIA cores for SLI multi-GPU technology, which in turn enables Mosaic Mode. A Mosaic Mode configuration can use multiple Quadro GPUs on many displays, but with all working in unison as one ultra-powerful processing unit.

Specifications

Form Factor	Deskside or 3U Rackmount Kit
NVIDIA Quadro GPU	Quadro FX 5800
# NVIDIA Quadro GPUs	2 or 4
Total Frame Buffer	8 GB or 16 GB (4GB/GPU)
Display Channels	4 dual-link DVI
SLI Mosaic Mode
Shader Model	4.0
NVIDIA® CUDA™ Parallel Computing Processor
Genlock/Framelock
Frame Synchronization
FSAA (maximum)	64x
G-Sync Version	II

It has the best resolution, image quality, and display size with solutions up to 128 SLI FSAA. The system also features the Quadro G-Sync solution, which enables frame synchronization, frame lock, and gen lock to help with performance, quality, and resolution.

The Quadro Plex 2200 is built on the proven Quadro GPU architecture and has the flexibility to be combined with any certified PCI Express platform with Gen 2 support. The system can be positioned desk-side, or fit into any standard 19" rack environment.

Full pricing information is not currently available, but the unit is said to be priced in the $10,750 range.

In addition to the FX 5800′s massive RAM, it also presents up to 240 CUDA programmable parallel cores. The memory bandwidth is up to 102GB per second, the card supports interactive 4D modeling with time lapse capability, and the fill rates are above 52 billion texels per second. Furthermore, the Quadro FX 5800 features 10-bit color, with geometry performance of up to 300 million triangles per second.

Of course, the FX 5800 supports both DirectX 10 and OpenGL. It also features multi-device and multi-system virtualization as well as Quadro G-Sync 2.

The NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800 is priced around $3500, position toward designers, engineers, architects, and other professionals who need top of the line graphics cards as a business component.

Having a dedicated GPU means that all graphics related processing can be offloaded to the graphics card, which can do a much better job at rendering graphics. The more efficient the GPU, the better the graphics display. In the 1990s, with the rise of the Windows operating system, 2D GPUs capable of high resolution rendering took the market by storm. As hardware and software applications continue to evolve, more powerful GPUs are needed to cater to the more demanding needs.

Modern games and software applications often require significant graphics processing power, mainly for 3D rendering and image/video processing. Such applications include 3D games and graphics/video manipulation software like Adobe CS4.

GPUs have now matured to the point that they can be used for processing other than visual.  The latest GPUs, including the GeForce 8, 9, and 200-series with a minimum of 256MB of local graphics memory, can accelerate such operations as video decoding, encoding, editing, audio encoding, image manipulation, and content creation.  This first came in the form of video decoding.  It would take at least eight Intel CPU cores to match the video decoding power of a single GPU using the NVIDIA PureVideo HD or ATI UVD decode engine in many cases.  With software designed to utilize the GPU for processing, the GPU is much faster than today’s dual-core and quad-core CPUs for other operations as well.  Another example is video encoding and transcoding.  An applications such as Badaboom can be accelerated as much as 400% using GPU processing.

Adobe CS4 is a modern image manipulation software used by many professional designers. The software started out as an image editing software, commonly known as Adobe Photoshop. Adobe Photoshop was used by many designers to edit 2D images – mostly photographs. Since then, Adobe has released a suite of image and video editing software. The whole suite of software is known as Adobe CS4. In the complete suite, you find new features that were not possible before the existence of 3D GPU.  In fact, with the CS4 release, Adobe has implemented full GPU acceleration to massively improve the performance of almost every operation.

For example, when using Adobe Photoshop CS4, you find that real-time zooming, panning, and rotation of even the largest image appears smooth and instantaneous. In other words, you will not see flickering as you would otherwise experience with a different video card or software application.

The differences are even more remarkable when you are using Adobe Premiere CS4. Adobe Premiere is one of the best video editing software solutions in the market. As special effects in videos such as blur effects or turbulent noise demand a lot more processing power, Adobe Premiere CS4 is able to take better advantage of nVidia’s GPU accelerating capabilities. The user will find it easier to add graphics and video effects to a video, thus speeding up the work flow dramatically.

As you can see, GPU acceleration is becoming well established as a “partner” of the CPU for many intensive tasks.  More and more applications will use GPU acceleration in the near future to offer significant performance increases and even power operations that were formerly not approachable with CPU power alone.   The popular TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress from Pegasys Inc. is one such application that is highly anticipated to utilize CUDA GPU acceleration.