The latest workstation graphics card from nVidia, the Quadro DCC, has been designed with the professional 3D artist in mind. The name DCC stands for Digital Content Creation. Anyone who spends their days and nights making 3D models and animation for film, broadcast or video games fits that description and will very likely find the Quadro DCC to be an excellent choice of graphics card.

Based upon the GeForce3 architecture, nVidia has designed this 64MB reference card for real-time 3D content creation. This gives the 3D artist instant feedback when creating, texturing, lighting and animating large models and environments. "We develop a core chipset architecture and then find ways to leverage that architecture," says Brian Burke of nVidia. The GeForce3 has been extended into the PC and Macintosh markets as a hardcore gaming card, the NV20 is the version found in the upcoming Microsoft Xbox and now the Quadro DCC is the professional workstation version. What separates the Quadro from its gaming cousins is full support of OpenGL and Direct3D functionality in high-end applications like discreet 3ds max, Alias|Wavefront Maya, Side Effects Software Houdini, Avid Softimage and NewTek Lightwave.

The Quadro DCC. Courtesy of and © nVidia.

Graphics Card Basics
What does a graphics card do? Essentially, graphics cards are the gateway between your computer's motherboard and your monitor. In 1987 IBM created the VGA standard which gave us 256 colors on screen. Next came the SVGA standard, providing us with our current palate of 16.8 million colors. But the graphics processing still took place in the CPU of the computer.

Since then, major evolutionary steps have taken place, allowing users to quickly manipulate large graphic files. By offloading the graphics processing tasks to the graphics card (now sometimes referred to as graphics processing unit or GPU) the CPU is free to handle other tasks. GPUs like the Voodoo and TNT chipsets were among the first to gain wide acceptance in gaming and the Permedia and Oxygen were two early workstation class chipsets. What the GPU does is draw the polygons that are formed by vertex sets, attach textures to these polygons, calculate the lighting values in the scene and then paint those pixels onto your monitor.

So, the GPU is really a co-processor that handles the heavy polygon crunching tasks and sends signals up to the monitor. The Quadro DCC can add special effects to the image in the form of nfiniteFX programmable pixel and vertex shaders. These effects can render environment reflections, bump maps, multi-textures and others in real-time without ever taxing the CPU. Think of Terminator 2-style liquid metal (without ever having to click the render button) and you'll get an idea of what it's like.