Hardware Shaders
Both 3ds max 4 and Maya 4 take advantage of nfiniteFX pixel and vertex shaders. 3ds max 4 uses the Hardware Shaders plug-in, while Maya allows you to use any texture as an environment map. This effect is impressive, and is useful in evaluating the surface of a model. More effects should make their way over from gaming as time goes on. One neat trick already possible in Maya 4 is realtime shadow casting. Man is it neat to see real-time shadows before you render! However, using too many spotlights with depth map shadows slows down performance.

These effects are the first of what will hopefully be a large variety of useful real-time shaders. Available on the development area of nVidia's Website is the NVEffects Browser that lets you preview some of the effects that programmers have built, such as cartoon shading, real-time refraction, fur shading and real-time glows. Unfortunately, until these are ported to the 3D applications, you can look, but not touch. (Looking at pre-release versions of Houdini 5 and Softimage xsi 2.0 at SIGGRAPH indicates that they too will take advantage of these nVidia effects.)

If anything was going to test a graphics card — it was Final Fantasy. Image courtesy of nVidia. © 2001 FFFP. All rights reserved. Square Pictures, Inc.

Conclusions
The Quadro DCC is a well-balanced, high-quality graphics card. It displays fast, accurate 2D performance in applications like Photoshop and After Effects. Its polygon pushing power is immense, as was demonstrated at SIGGRAPH where it was used to run scenes from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within in real-time. One thing worth getting excited about is the future of pixel and vertex shader effects; it's just too bad that more of them aren't readily available now.

Without doing a side-by-side comparison with the Quadro DCC's main competitors, like the 3Dlabs Wildcat II 5000 and the ATI FireGL4, it's impossible to declare a winner in the workstation graphics card war. AWN will review those cards in the future and provide a graphics card roundup. That said, I strongly recommend the Quadro DCC to any 3D artist who wants fast performance and access to time-saving real-time effects.

Currently, you can get your hands on the Quadro DCC through nVidia's technology partner Elsa in the form of the Elsa Gloria DCC for $999.00. It is also available as an OEM option on the Hewlett-Packard HP Workstation x2000 and x4000.

John Edgar Park is a 3D animator, instructor and writer based in Los Angeles. He received his B.A. in Drama from the University of Virginia.