History
The Quadro line of GPU cards emerged in an effort at 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; e.g., high performance anti-aliased lines and two-sided lighting were reserved for the Quadro product. In addition, improved support through a certified driver program was put in place. These features were of little value in the gaming markets that NVIDIA's products already sold to, but prevented high end customers from using the less expensive products. This practice continues even today although some products use higher capacity and faster memory.
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 (SGI VPro VR3) | Quadro2 Pro (ELSA GLoria III) | Quadro DCC (ELSA GLoria DCC) | Quadro4 980 XGL |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quadro FX 1300 | Quadro FX 2000 | Quadro FX 4000 | Quadro FX 5600 |
Read more about this topic: Nvidia Quadro
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