Quadro was Nvidia's brand for graphics cards intended for use in workstations running professional computer-aided design (CAD), computer-generated imagery (CGI), digital content creation (DCC) applications, scientific calculations and machine learning from 2000 to 2020. Quadro-branded graphics cards differed from the mainstream GeForce lines in that the Quadro cards included the use of ECC memory and enhanced floating point precision. These are desirable properties when the cards are used for calculations which require greater reliability and precision compared to graphics rendering for video games. The Nvidia Quadro product line directly competed with AMD's Radeon Pro (formerly FirePro/FireGL) line of professional workstation graphics cards. Nvidia has since moved away from the Quadro branding for new products, starting with the Turing architecture-based RTX 4000 released on November 13, 2018 and then phasing it out entirely with launch of the Ampere architecture-based RTX A6000 on October 5, 2020. To indicate the upgrade to the Nvidia Ampere architecture for their graphics cards technology, Nvidia RTX is the product line being produced and developed moving forward for use in professional workstations.

History

The Quadro line of GPU cards emerged in an effort towards 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, such as high-performance anti-aliased lines and two-sided lighting, in the Quadro product. These features were of little value to the gamers that Nvidia's products already sold to, but their lack prevented high-end customers from using the less expensive products. The Quadro line also received improved support through a certified driver program. 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 SDI

Actual extra cards only for Quadro 4000 cards and higher:

Quadro Plex

Quadro Plex consists of a line of external servers for rendering videos. A Quadro Plex contains multiple Quadro FX video cards. A client computer connects to Quadro Plex (using PCI Express ×8 or ×16 interface card with interconnect cable) to initiate rendering.

Quadro SLI and Sync

Scalable Link Interface, or SLI, has been considered as the next generation of Plex. Originally used for the GeForce line of graphics cards, it is a multi-GPU technology that uses two or more video cards to produce a single output. SLI can improve Frame Rendering and FSAA. Quadro SLI supports Mosaic technology for multiple displays using two cards in parallel and up to 8 possible monitors. Most cards have an SLI bridge slot for up to four cards on one motherboard. With Quadro Sync technology, cards can support up to a maximum of 16 possible monitors (using four cards in parallel). Nvidia has 4 types of SLI bridges: In both SLI and SYNC technologies, acceleration of scientific calculations is possible with CUDA and OpenCL.

Quadro VCA

Nvidia supports SLI and supercomputing with its 8-GPU Visual Computing Appliance. Nvidia Iray, Chaosgroup V-Ray and Nvidia OptiX accelerate Raytracing for Maya, 3DS Max, Cinema4D, Rhinoceros and others. All software with CUDA or OpenCL, such as ANSYS, NASTRAN, ABAQUS, and OpenFoam, can benefit from VCA. The DGX-1 is available with 8 GP100 Cards.

Quadro RTX

The Quadro RTX series is based on the Turing microarchitecture, and features real-time raytracing. This is accelerated by the use of new RT cores, which are designed to process quadtrees and spherical hierarchies, and speed up collision tests with individual triangles. The Turing microarchitecture debuted with the Quadro RTX series before the mainstream consumer GeForce RTX line. The raytracing performed by the RT cores can be used to produce reflections, refractions and shadows, replacing traditional raster techniques such as cube maps and depth maps. Instead of replacing rasterization entirely, however, the information gathered from ray-tracing can be used to augment the shading with information that is much more physically correct, especially regarding off-camera action. Tensor cores further enhance the image produced by raytracing, and are used to de-noise a partially rendered image. RTX is also the name of the development platform introduced for the Quadro RTX series. RTX leverages Microsoft's DXR, OptiX and Vulkan for access to raytracing. Turing is manufactured using TSMC's 12 nm FinFET fabrication process. Quadro RTX also uses GDDR6 memory from Samsung Electronics.

Video cards

GeForce

Many of the Quadro line of video cards use the same GPU cores as Nvidia's consumer-and-gaming-oriented GeForce brand of video cards. The cards that are nearly identical to the desktop cards can be modified to identify themselves as the equivalent Quadro card to the operating system, allowing optimized drivers intended for the Quadro cards to be installed on the system. While this may not offer all of the performance of the equivalent Quadro card, it can improve performance in certain applications, but may require installing the MAXtreme driver for comparable speed. The performance difference comes in the firmware controlling the card. Given the importance of speed in a game, a system used for gaming can shut down textures, shading, or rendering after only approximating a final output—in order to keep the overall frame rate high. The algorithms on a CAD-oriented card tend rather to complete all rendering operations, even if that introduces delays or variations in the timing, prioritising accuracy and rendering quality over speed. A Geforce card focuses more on texture fillrates and high framerates with lighting and sound, but Quadro cards prioritize wireframe rendering and object interactions.

Desktop AGP

Desktop PCI

Desktop PCI Express

Quadro FX (without CUDA, OpenCL, or Vulkan)

Quadro FX (with CUDA and OpenCL, but no Vulkan)

Quadro

1 Nvidia Quadro 342.01 WHQL: support of OpenGL 3.3 and OpenCL 1.1 for legacy Tesla microarchitecture Quadros. 2 Nvidia Quadro 377.83 WHQL: support of OpenGL 4.5, OpenCL 1.1 for legacy Fermi microarchitecture Quadros. 3 Nvidia Quadro 474.72 WHQL: support of OpenGL 4.6, OpenCL 1.2, Vulkan 1.2 for legacy Kepler microarchitecture Quadros. 4 Nvidia Quadro 552.22 WHQL: support of OpenGL 4.6, OpenCL 3.0, Vulkan 1.3 for Maxwell, Pascal & Volta microarchitecture Quadros. 5 OpenCL 1.1 is available for Tesla-Chips, OpenCL 1.0 for some Cards with G8x, G9x and GT200 by MAC OS X

Quadro RTX/T/RTX

For business NVS

The Nvidia Quadro NVS graphics processing units (GPUs) provide business graphics solutions for manufacturers of small, medium, and enterprise-level business workstations. The Nvidia Quadro NVS desktop solutions enable multi-display graphics for businesses such as financial traders.

Mobile applications

Quadro FX M (without Vulkan)

Quadro NVS M

Quadro M

Quadro/Quadro RTX/RTX Mobile

NVENC and NVDEC support matrix

Hardware accelerated video encoding (via NVENC) and decoding (via NVDEC) is supported on NVIDIA Quadro products with Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal, Turing, Ampere and Ada generation GPUs. Fermi based GPUs support decoding only.

Driver and SDK Software

Quadro/RTX drivers

CUDA

Supported CUDA Level of GPU and Card.