Siggraph 2003: San Diego

Article by Michael Tran and Harry Lam
July 27-31, 2003

nVidia:

At this year's Siggraph, nVidia made product announcements for their new series of workstation video cards: the Quadro FX 3000 and Quadro FX 3000G products.  These new cards basically continue the Quadro FX line by offering a 256MB solution for workstation graphics.

nVidia's Quadro FX 3000

The Quadro FX 3000G offers a few features over the Quadro FX 3000, namely the support for Genlock and Frame Lock.  Frame Lock is the ability to synchronize frames between multiple Quadro FX 3000G cards, basically allowing for video card clustering across multiple systems.  Genlock gives the FX 3000G the ability to synchronize its vertical refresh to external devices, allowing for all of the devices in a post-production studio to work together efficiently.

nVidia's Quadro FX 3000G

We got to see nVidia's support for Frame Lock in action with a multi-system cluster that powered a nine LCD display in a 3x3 configuration.  Although the amount of rendering required for this beautiful "virtual showroom" would sometimes bring nVidia's cluster to its knees, the user interactive display was nevertheless impressive.

The last thing that nVidia showed us was their new single-system powerwall technology, which allowed for two slightly overlapping projectors to be driven from one video card.  This effectively doubles the horizontal resolution of a projected display, allowing for an ultra wide screen.  Although nVidia still has some kinks to work out in their drivers, which explains the ultra bright spot where the two projectors overlap, they assured us that this technology will be available on their new workstation cards relatively soon.