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Nvidia plans to make business meetings 3D

The company's new 3D Vision Pro products are designed for business meetings and presentations.

By Agam Shah / Wednesday, July 28 2010

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The glasses cost US$349 and the transmitter US$399; both will be available in October through sales channels, Nvidia said.

The company also introduced Quadro graphics cards for desktops and workstations. Quadro products fall between the GeForce line of consumer graphics cards and the Tesla line of graphics cards generally used in supercomputers.

The Quadro 4000, 5000, and 6000 graphics cards are based on the new Fermi architecture and are faster than the previous generation of Quadro products. The new cards include more processing cores, operate at faster clock speeds and are able to generate more realistic images. The cards are designed for use in applications related to science, medicine, and oil and gas exploration, Fitzpatrick said.

The Quadro 4000 will include 256 processing cores, while the Quadro 5000 and 6000 will include 352 and 448 processing cores, respectively. The company also introduced the QuadroPlex 7000 graphics card, which combines two Quadro 6000 graphics cards in one unit.

The products will be able to harness the parallel-processing capabilities of graphics processors to improve application performance, Fitzpatrick said. That is done by native hardware support for DirectX 11, a set of parallel computing tools designed to bring realistic images on Windows 7 PCs. Nvidia also offers CUDA, a set of programming tools to develop applications for parallel task execution.

The 4000 will be priced at US$1,199, while the 5000 will be US$2,249. They will become available worldwide starting on August 2. The Quadro 6000 (US$4,999) and QuadroPlex 7000 (US$14,500) will become available around October.