The Nvidia Quadro series^[1] of AGP, PCI, and PCI Express graphics cards comes from the NVIDIA Corporation. Their designers aimed to accelerate CAD (Computer-Aided Design) and DCC (digital content creation), and the cards are usually featured in workstations (Compared to the NVIDIA GeForce product line, which specifically targets computer gaming). Competing products include the FirePro line of workstation graphics cards by Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (Made formerly by ATI Technologies, Inc.). Companies such as Matrox and Avid also focus on specialized hardware accelerated graphics cards intended primarily for DCC.

History

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. This practice continues even today although some products use higher capacity faster memory.
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)

Video cards

GeForce

Many of these cards use the same core as the game- and action-oriented GeForce video cards by NVIDIA. Those cards that are identical to the desktop cards can be software modified to identify themselves as the equivalent Quadro cards and this allows 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