Nvidia Quadro

Quadro is 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.

The GPU chips on Quadro-branded graphics cards are identical to the ones used on GeForce-branded graphics cards. The end products (i.e. the graphics card) differentiate substantially by the provided graphics device drivers and through the available professional support for the software.

Competitors include AMD's FirePro and Radeon Pro products, as well as Intel's Xeon Phi-branded products.

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.

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).

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