New Nvidia Graphics Card Built to Save Lives

Are you disappointed with those graphics in your favorite PC games? Not pleased that you have to turn down the resolution on games like Crysis or Far Cry 2? Well, if you've got $3,500 to shell out, Nvidia has a product for you: the Quadro FX 5800, the most powerful graphics card ever made.

Nvidia truly has revealed the Lamborghini of graphics cards. The Quadra FX 5800 boasts an astounding 4 GB of graphics memory and up to 240 Cuda programmable parallel cores. Interactive 4D modeling is also one of its best new features, in addition to a memory bandwidth of 102 GB per second. Fill rates for this thing actually exceed 52 billion texels per second and 300 million triangles per second. (Source: digitimes.com)

Now, most of that graphics jargon makes little sense, even to hardcore PC gamers. Forget about the billions of triangles and the texels and bandwidth and just concentrate on one vital improvement over past graphics cards: the memory. The Quadra FX 5800 can boast all those stats because it is the first card ever to include 4 GB of RAM; even the most powerful graphics cards Nvidia has on the market today don't go over 2.

Although the Quadra FX 5800 would conceivably make for a very sweet gaming core, it's purposes will be varied. The real intent is to use these graphics capabilities to "drill, baby, drill", save lives, and compliment design software. The Quadra will be especially useful for oil and gas exploration, medical research, and architecture, among other things.

So, the Quadra FX 5800 is really all about helping the economy and healthcare. Thilaka Sumanaweera, CTO of Cyberheart, noted that "The advanced textured graphics capabilities of the Quadro FX 5800 are enabling CyberHeart to provide 3D radiosurgical target visualization and definition tools for the purpose of treating cardiac arrhythmias...The Quadro FX cards provide us with the extreme bandwidth necessary to support our cutting-edge technology, and essentially, save lives." (Source: efluxmedia.com)

Surprisingly, because the Quadra FX 5800 is so geared to advanced research technologies, it isn't actually that great for gaming. In fact, some preliminary reports suggest it may actually hurt game performance.

What? You mean people do something other than play deathmatch on their computers?