Nvidia Quadro Plex

[emmevi]

Good morning
Does anyone have some more infos on the new Quadro Plex ?
(Whitepaper or PPTs )

Many thanks
best regards
Mirko

[plesch]

I would be interested as well. In particular, I would like to know what justifies the high price of $17.5K when compared to a dual quadro fx 5500 setup.

Just before the announcement, I had looked into a dual quadro setup for a triple projector active stereo system and did some pricing.

The current price for a FX 5500 is $2500 and $3200 for a FX 5500G which appears to be a 5500 bundled with a G-Sync card. One would need only one G-Sync card, actually only one is supported per system. The price would then be $5700 total.

The markup would be more than $10k which would cover the additional components (cage, plex board, pc board?, power, ...) and development. This seems a bit steep.

The benefits of the quadro plex would be as far as I can see:

- prepackaged
- hopefully well supported
- additional power
- less noise
- option to a add second plex on a second 16x pci-e slot.

but no performance improvement.

Is that characterization justified ?

Has anybody seen one, perhaps now on siggraph ?

Andreas

[plesch]

Here is short clip from siggraph talking about quadro plex

http://light.cgsociety.org/siggraph2006/movies/part_one/nvidia_day_one.mov

not much content, except for confirming that it was done in way to couple more than one together, "beyond sli"

[Bman212121]

Best I've seen atm:

Boston (MA) - If you wondered about Nvidia's business options once ATI has been acquired by AMD, here's one idea: High-end graphics.

Nvidia says it has achieved a "quantum leap" in visual compute density, packed in what the company claims is the world's first "visual computing system." Called the Quadro Plex 1000, is a professional graphics machine that is offered in a desktop or 3U rackmount configuration, which are designed to provide higher graphics performance for 12-megapixel HD video (4K) processing, 3D styling and design, scientific and medical visualization, oil and gas exploration, or visual simulation and training.


The one "node" can house up to eight Quadro FX graphics chips in two Plex 1000 systems that are connected via SLI and are supported by an AMD- or Intel-based 32-bit or 64-bit host system running Windows or Linux. According to Nvidia, a node can achieve up to 64x full scene anti-aliasing (FSAA), deliver a performance of up to 148 megapixels on 16 synchronized digital-output channels and eight HD SDI channels. The firm says that the fill rate reaches 80 billion pixels/s while the geometry performance is rated at seven billion vertices/s.

Nvidia plans to ship Quadro Plex systems beginning in September for prices starting around $17,500.

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/08/01/nvidia_quadro_plex_1000/

[plesch]

Thanks, that confirms that it is possible to couple two plexes to one node, via SLI. Let's speculate that they have plans to couple multiple _nodes_ together in the future but this does not seem be an option now for it is never mentioned.

Well, our interest would be in a single plex first. Still not sure what the real advantages are compared to a standard dual fx 5500 setup.

Maybe the plex is the only way to reliably run this ? But I am sure people do this now, successfully, no ?

Andreas

[plesch]

There is a second video from siggraph:

http://light.cgsociety.org/siggraph2006/movies/part_two/nvidia_day_two.mov

but again not much content but they show a 16 plex configuration. The same 16 plex configuration can be found in pictures if you google image search. There is no mentioning of what this configuration may actually do. Since the maximum number of plexes per host is indeed two, maybe the idea is to connect multiple, connected hosts (cluster nodes) for distributed rendering.

I also read in one of the reports now available that there is a 500W power supply inside and the noise level is 40db as far as I recall.

Aah, the nvidia specs themselves (perhaps updated)

http://www.nvidia.com/page/quadroplex_comparison_chart.html

show these specs.

A third video:

http://light.cgsociety.org/siggraph2006/movies/part_three/nvidia_day_three.mov

without new information.