Quadro was

Nvidia Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...

brand A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that distinguishes one seller's goods or service from those of other sellers. Brands are used in business, marketing, and advertising for recognition and, importantly, to create and ...

for

graphics cards A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics accelerator, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or colloquially GPU) is a computer expansion card that generates a feed of graphics output to a displa ...

intended for use in

workstations A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''workstat ...

running professional

computer-aided design Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computers (or ) to aid in the creation, modification, analysis, or optimization of a design. This software is used to increase the productivity of the designer, improve the quality of design, improve c ...

(CAD),

computer-generated imagery Computer-generated imagery (CGI) is a specific-technology or application of computer graphics for creating or improving images in Digital art, art, Publishing, printed media, Training simulation, simulators, videos and video games. These images ...

(CGI), digital content creation (DCC) applications, scientific calculations and machine learning from 2000 to 2020. NVIDIA_Quadro_K6000

Quadro-branded graphics cards differed from the mainstream

GeForce GeForce is a brand of graphics processing units (GPUs) designed by Nvidia and marketed for the performance market. As of the GeForce 50 series, there have been nineteen iterations of the design. In August 2017, Nvidia stated that "there are o ...

lines in that the Quadro cards included the use of

ECC memory Error correction code memory (ECC memory) is a type of computer data storage that uses an error correction code (ECC) to detect and correct ''n''-bit data corruption which occurs in memory. Typically, ECC memory maintains a memory system immun ...

, larger GPU cache, and enhanced

floating point In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic on subsets of real numbers formed by a ''significand'' (a signed sequence of a fixed number of digits in some base) multiplied by an integer power of that base. Numbers of this form ...

precision. These are desirable properties when the cards are used for calculations which require greater reliability and precision compared to graphics rendering for video games. The Nvidia Quadro product line directly competed with

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...

's Radeon Pro (formerly FirePro/FireGL) line of professional workstation graphics cards. Nvidia has since moved away from the Quadro branding for new products, starting with the Turing architecture-based RTX 4000 released on November 13, 2018 and then phasing it out entirely with launch of the Ampere architecture-based RTX A6000 on October 5, 2020. To indicate the upgrade to the Nvidia Ampere architecture for their graphics cards technology,

Nvidia RTX Nvidia RTX (also known as Nvidia GeForce RTX under the GeForce brand) is a professional visual computing platform created by Nvidia, used in mainstream PCs for gaming as well as being used in workstations for designing complex large-scale model ...

is the product line being produced and developed moving forward for use in professional workstations. This branding lasted until the beginning of the Blackwell architecture era in 2025, when the workstation graphics card line was rebranded to RTX PRO in order to distinguish it further from the gaming-oriented GeForce RTX line.

History

The Quadro line of GPU cards emerged in an effort towards 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, such as high-performance anti-aliased lines and two-sided lighting, in the Quadro product. These features were of little value to the gamers that Nvidia's products already sold to, but their lack prevented high-end customers from using the less expensive products. The Quadro line also received improved support through a certified driver program. 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 The VPRO (stylized vpro; originally an acronym for ''Vrijzinnig Protestantse Radio Omroep'', lit. 'Liberal Protestant Radio Broadcaster', nowadays known as ''Omroepvereniging VPRO'') is a Netherlands, Dutch Public broadcasting, public broadca ...

products initially sold on their

IRIX IRIX (, ) is a discontinued operating system developed by Silicon Graphics (SGI) to run on the company's proprietary MIPS architecture, MIPS workstations and servers. It is based on UNIX System V with Berkeley Software Distribution, BSD extensio ...

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).

Quadro SDI

Actual extra cards only for Quadro 4000 cards and higher: *SDI Capture: *SDI Output:

Quadro Plex

Quadro Plex consists of a line of external servers for rendering videos. A Quadro Plex contains multiple Quadro FX video cards. A client computer connects to Quadro Plex (using PCI Express ×8 or ×16 interface card with interconnect cable) to initiate rendering.

Quadro SLI and Sync

Scalable Link Interface, or SLI, has been considered as the next generation of Plex. Originally used for the

line of graphics cards, it is a multi-GPU technology that uses two or more video cards to produce a single output. SLI can improve Frame Rendering and FSAA. Quadro SLI supports Mosaic technology for multiple displays using two cards in parallel and up to 8 possible monitors. Most cards have an SLI bridge slot for up to four cards on one motherboard. With Quadro Sync technology, cards can support up to a maximum of 16 possible monitors (using four cards in parallel). Nvidia has 4 types of SLI bridges: *Standard Bridge (400 MHz Pixel Clock and 1 GB/s bandwidth) *LED Bridge (540 MHz Pixel Clock) *High-Bandwidth Bridge (650 MHz Pixel Clock) *PCI-e lanes only reserved for SLI In both SLI and SYNC technologies, acceleration of scientific calculations is possible with

CUDA In computing, CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a proprietary parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for accelerated gene ...

and

OpenCL OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a software framework, framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous computing, heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), di ...

Quadro VCA

Nvidia supports SLI and supercomputing with its 8-GPU Visual Computing Appliance. Nvidia Iray, Chaosgroup V-Ray and Nvidia OptiX accelerate Raytracing for Maya, 3DS Max, Cinema4D, Rhinoceros and others. All software with

, such as ANSYS, NASTRAN, ABAQUS, and OpenFoam, can benefit from VCA. The DGX-1 is available with 8 GP100 Cards.

Quadro RTX

The Quadro RTX series is based on the Turing microarchitecture, and features real-time raytracing. This is accelerated by the use of new RT cores, which are designed to process

quadtree A quadtree is a tree data structure in which each internal node has exactly four children. Quadtrees are the two-dimensional analog of octrees and are most often used to partition a two-dimensional space by recursively subdividing it into four ...

s and spherical hierarchies, and speed up collision tests with individual triangles. The Turing microarchitecture debuted with the Quadro RTX series before the mainstream consumer GeForce RTX line. The raytracing performed by the RT cores can be used to produce reflections, refractions and shadows, replacing traditional raster techniques such as cube maps and

depth map In 3D computer graphics and computer vision, a depth map is an Digital image, image or Channel (digital image), image channel that contains information relating to the distance of the Computer representation of surfaces, surfaces of scene objec ...

s. Instead of replacing rasterization entirely, however, the information gathered from ray-tracing can be used to augment the shading with information that is much more physically correct, especially regarding off-camera action. Tensor cores further enhance the image produced by raytracing, and are used to de-noise a partially rendered image. RTX is also the name of the development platform introduced for the Quadro RTX series. RTX leverages

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

's DXR, OptiX and

Vulkan Vulkan is a cross-platform API and open standard for 3D graphics and computing. It was intended to address the shortcomings of OpenGL, and allow developers more control over the GPU. It is designed to support a wide variety of GPUs, CPUs and o ...

for access to raytracing. Turing is manufactured using

TSMC Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC or Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is one of the world's most valuable semiconductor companies, the world' ...

's 12 nm

FinFET A fin field-effect transistor (FinFET) is a multigate device, a MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor) built on a substrate where the gate is placed on two, three, or four sides of the channel or wrapped around the chann ...

fabrication process Semiconductor device fabrication is the process used to manufacture semiconductor devices, typically integrated circuits (ICs) such as microprocessors, microcontrollers, and memories (such as Random-access memory, RAM and flash memory). It is a ...

. Quadro RTX also uses

GDDR6 Graphics Double Data Rate 6 Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory (GDDR6 SDRAM) is a type of synchronous graphics random-access memory (SGRAM) with a high bandwidth, "double data rate" interface, designed for use in graphics cards, game con ...

memory from

Samsung Electronics Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (SEC; stylized as SΛMSUNG; ) is a South Korean multinational major appliance and consumer electronics corporation founded on 13 January 1969 and headquartered in Yeongtong District, Suwon, South Korea. It is curr ...

Video cards

GeForce

Many of the Quadro line of video cards use the same GPU cores as Nvidia's consumer-and-gaming-oriented GeForce brand of video cards. The cards that are nearly identical to the desktop cards can be modified to identify themselves as the equivalent Quadro card to the operating system, allowing 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 In computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computer, computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and the development of both computer hardware, h ...

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 Frame rate, most commonly expressed in frame/s, or FPS, is typically the frequency (rate) at which consecutive images (Film frame, frames) are captured or displayed. This definition applies to film and video cameras, computer animation, and moti ...

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. A Geforce card focuses more on texture fillrates and high framerates with lighting and sound, but Quadro cards prioritize wireframe rendering and object interactions.

Desktop AGP

*Architecture Celsius (NV1x): DirectX 7, OpenGL 1.2 (1.3) *Architecture Kelvin (NV2x): DirectX 8 (8.1), OpenGL 1.3 (1.5), Pixel Shader 1.1 (1.3) *Architecture Rankine (NV3x): DirectX 9.0a, OpenGL 1.5 (2.1), Shader Model 2.0a *Architecture Curie (NV4x): DirectX 9.0c, OpenGL 2.1, Shader Model 3.0

Desktop PCI

*Architecture Rankine (NV3x): DirectX 9.0a, OpenGL 1.5 (2.1), Shader Model 2.0a

Desktop PCI Express

Quadro FX (without CUDA, OpenCL, or Vulkan)

* Rankine (NV3x): DirectX 9.0a, Shader Model 2.0a, OpenGL 2.1 *

Curie Curie may refer to: *Curie family, a family of distinguished scientists: :* Jacques Curie (1856–1941), French physicist, Pierre's brother :* Pierre Curie (1859–1906), French physicist and Nobel Prize winner, Marie's husband :* Marie Curi ...

(NV4x, G7x): DirectX 9.0c, Shader Model 3.0, OpenGL 2.1

Quadro FX (with CUDA and OpenCL, but no Vulkan)

* Architecture Tesla (G80+, GT2xx) with OpenGL 3.3 and OpenCL 1.1 * Tesla (G80+): DirectX 10, Shader Model 4.0, only Single Precision (FP32) available for CUDA and OpenCL * Tesla 2 (GT2xx): DirectX 10.1, Shader Model 4.1, Single Precision (FP32) available for CUDA and OpenCL (Double Precision (FP64) available for CUDA and OpenCL only for GT200 with CUDA Compute Capability 1.3 )

Quadro

* Architecture Fermi (GFxxx), Kepler (GKxxx), Maxwell (GMxxx), Pascal (GPxxx), Volta (GVxxx) (except Quadro 400 with Tesla 2) * All Cards with Display Port 1.1+ can support 10bit per Channel for OpenGL (HDR for Graphics Professional (Adobe Photoshop and more)) * Vulkan 1.2 available with Driver Windows 456.38, Linux 455.23.04 for Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal, Volta * All Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal, Volta and later can do OpenGL 4.6 with Driver 418+ * All Quadro can do OpenCL 1.1. Kepler can do OpenCL 1.2, Maxwell and later can do OpenCL 3.0 * All can do Double Precision with Compute Capability 2.0 and higher (see

) ¹ Nvidia Quadro 342.01 WHQL: support of OpenGL 3.3 and OpenCL 1.1 for legacy Tesla microarchitecture Quadros. ² Nvidia Quadro 377.83 WHQL: support of OpenGL 4.5, OpenCL 1.1 for legacy Fermi microarchitecture Quadros. ³ Nvidia Quadro 474.72 WHQL: support of OpenGL 4.6, OpenCL 1.2, Vulkan 1.2 for legacy Kepler microarchitecture Quadros. ⁴ Nvidia Quadro 552.22 WHQL: support of OpenGL 4.6, OpenCL 3.0, Vulkan 1.3 for Maxwell, Pascal & Volta microarchitecture Quadros. ⁵ OpenCL 1.1 is available for Tesla-Chips, OpenCL 1.0 for some Cards with G8x, G9x and GT200 by MAC OS X

Quadro RTX/T/RTX

* Turing (TU10x) microarchitecture *

Ampere The ampere ( , ; symbol: A), often shortened to amp,SI supports only the use of symbols and deprecates the use of abbreviations for units. is the unit of electric current in the International System of Units (SI). One ampere is equal to 1 c ...

(GA10x) microarchitecture *

Ada Lovelace Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (''née'' Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852), also known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-pur ...

(AD10x) microarchitecture *Quadro naming dropped beginning with Ampere-based GPUs and later Turing-based GPUs (T400, T600, T1000) *Quadro RTX/RTX series GPUs have tensor cores and hardware support for real-time ray tracing

For business NVS

The Nvidia Quadro NVS graphics processing units (GPUs) provide business graphics solutions for manufacturers of small, medium, and enterprise-level business workstations. The Nvidia Quadro NVS desktop solutions enable multi-display graphics for businesses such as financial traders. *Architecture Celsius (NV1x): DirectX 7, OpenGL 1.2 (1.3) *Architecture Kelvin (NV2x): DirectX 8 (8.1), OpenGL 1.3 (1.5), Pixel Shader 1.1 (1.3) *Architecture Rankine (NV3x): DirectX 9.0a, OpenGL 1.5 (2.1), Shader Model 2.0a *Architecture Curie (NV4x): DirectX 9.0c, OpenGL 2.1, Shader Model 3.0 *Architecture Tesla (G80+): DirectX 10.0, OpenGL 3.3, Shader Model 4.0, CUDA 1.0 or 1.1, OpenCL 1.1 *Architecture Tesla 2 (GT2xx): DirectX 10.1, OpenGL 3.3, Shader Model 4.1, CUDA 1.2 or 1.3, OpenCL 1.1 *Architecture Fermi (GFxxx): DirectX 11.0, OpenGL 4.6, Shader Model 5.0, CUDA 2.x, OpenCL 1.1 *Architecture Kepler (GKxxx): DirectX 11.2, OpenGL 4.6, Shader Model 5.0, CUDA 3.x, OpenCL 1.2, Vulkan 1.2 *Architecture Maxwell 1 (GM1xx): DirectX 12.0, OpenGL 4.6, Shader Model 5.0, CUDA 5.0, OpenCL 3.0, Vulkan 1.3

Mobile applications

Quadro FX M (without Vulkan)

* Architecture Rankine (NV3x),

(NV4x, G7x) and Tesla (G80+, GT2xx)

Quadro NVS M

*Architecture

(NV4x, G7x): DirectX 9.0c, OpenGL 2.1, Shader Model 3.0 *Architecture Tesla (G80+): DirectX 10.0, OpenGL 3.3, Shader Model 4.0, CUDA 1.0 or 1.1, OpenCL 1.1 *Architecture Tesla 2 (GT2xx): DirectX 10.1, OpenGL 3.3, Shader Model 4.1, CUDA 1.2 or 1.3, OpenCL 1.1 *Architecture Fermi (GFxxx): DirectX 11.0, OpenGL 4.6, Shader Model 5.0, CUDA 2.x, OpenCL 1.1 *Architecture

Kepler Johannes Kepler (27 December 1571 – 15 November 1630) was a German astronomer, mathematician, astrologer, natural philosopher and writer on music. He is a key figure in the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, best known for his laws of p ...

(GKxxx): DirectX 11.2, OpenGL 4.6, Shader Model 5.0, CUDA 3.x, OpenCL 1.2, Vulkan 1.1 *Architecture

Maxwell Maxwell may refer to: People * Maxwell (surname), including a list of people and fictional characters with the name ** James Clerk Maxwell, mathematician and physicist * Justice Maxwell (disambiguation) * Maxwell baronets, in the Baronetage of N ...

1 (GM1xx): DirectX 12.0, OpenGL 4.6, Shader Model 5.0, CUDA 5.0, OpenCL 1.2, Vulkan 1.1

Quadro M

* Architecture Fermi,

, Pascal * Fermi, Kepler, Maxwell, and Pascal support OpenGL 4.6 with driver versions 381+ on Linux or 390+ on Windows * All can do Double Precision with compute Capability 1.3 and higher * Vulkan 1.2 on Kepler and 1.3 on Maxwell and later * Quadro 5000M has 2048 MB of VRAM, of which 1792 MB is usable with ECC enabled.

Quadro/Quadro RTX/RTX Mobile

* Turing (TU10x) microarchitecture *

(GA10x) microarchitecture *

(AD10x) microarchitecture *Quadro naming dropped beginning with Ampere-based GPUs and later Turing-based GPUs (T500, T600, T1200) *Quadro RTX/RTX series GPUs have tensor cores and hardware support for realtime ray tracing

NVENC and NVDEC support matrix

Hardware accelerated video encoding (via NVENC) and decoding (via NVDEC) is supported on NVIDIA Quadro products with Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal, Turing, Ampere and Ada generation GPUs. Fermi based GPUs support decoding only.

Driver and SDK Software

Quadro/RTX drivers

* Curie-Architecture Last drivers see Driver Portal of Nvidia (End-of-Life) * Tesla-Architecture (G80+, GT2xx) in Legacy Mode Quadro Driver 340: OpenGL 3.3, OpenCL 1.1, DirectX 10.0/10.1 (End-of-Life) * Fermi (GFxxx): OpenCL 1.1, OpenGL 4.5, some OpenGL 2016 Features with Quadro Driver 375, in legacy mode with version 392.68 (End-of-Life) *

(GKxxx): OpenCL 1.2, OpenGL 4.6, Vulkan 1.2 with RTX Enterprise/Quadro Driver 470 (End-of-Life) *

(GMxxx): OpenCL 3.0, OpenGL 4.6, Vulkan 1.3 with RTX Enterprise/Quadro Driver 550+ * Pascal (GPxxx): OpenCL 3.0, OpenGL 4.6, Vulkan 1.3 with RTX Enterprise/Quadro driver 550+ *Volta (GVxxx): OpenCL 3.0, OpenGL 4.6, Vulkan 1.3 with RTX Enterprise/Quadro driver 550+ * Turing (TUxxx): OpenCL 3.0, OpenGL 4.6, Vulkan 1.3 with RTX Enterprise/Quadro driver 550+ *

(GAxxx): OpenCL 3.0, OpenGL 4.6, Vulkan 1.3 with RTX Enterprise/Quadro driver 550+ *

(ADxxx): OpenCL 3.0, OpenGL 4.6, Vulkan 1.3 with RTX Enterprise/Quadro driver 550+

CUDA

*Tesla Architecture and later Supported

Level of GPU and Card. *CUDA SDK 6.5 support for Compute Capability 1.0 – 5.x (Tesla, Fermi, Kepler, Maxwell) Last Version with support for Tesla-Architecture with Compute Capability 1.x *CUDA SDK 7.5 support for Compute Capability 2.0 – 5.x (Fermi, Kepler, Maxwell) *CUDA SDK 8.0 support for Compute Capability 2.0 – 6.x (Fermi, Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal) Last version with support for compute capability 2.x (Fermi) *CUDA SDK 9.0/9.1/9.2 support for Compute Capability 3.0 – 7.2 (Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal, Volta) *CUDA SDK 10.0/10.1/10.2 support for Compute Capability 3.0 – 7.5 (Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal, Volta, Turing) Last version with support for compute capability 3.x (Kepler). *CUDA SDK 11.0/11.1/11.2/11.3/11.4/11.5/11.6/11.7 support for Compute Capability 3.5 – 8.9 (Kepler(GK110, GK208, GK210 only), Maxwell, Pascal, Volta, Turing, Ampere, Ada Lovelace) *CUDA SDK 11.8 support for Compute Capability 3.5 – 8.9 (Kepler(GK110, GK208, GK210 only), Maxwell, Pascal, Volta, Turing, Ampere, Ada Lovelace) *CUDA SDK 12.0 support for Compute Capability 5.0 – 8.9 (Maxwell, Pascal, Volta, Turing, Ampere, Ada Lovelace)

Notes

References

External links

NVIDIA RTX in Professional Workstations

NVIDIA RTX in Professional Laptops

Nvidia Nsight
{{Graphics Processing Unit Quadro Graphics cards