Nvidia Quadro
Quadro is a brand name of the company Nvidia for a number of professional 3D and 2D graphics cards. Nvidia Quadro products used for the regular GeForce GPUs with special circuitry that changes the chip ID. As the regular driver ForceWare drivers are used, which are also eligible for GeForce used. From time to time a driver version is certified for various professional applications and separately available for download, since the use of a certified driver is often a prerequisite for obtaining support of the manufacturer of the application. The ForceWare drivers unlock based on the chip ID in Quadro cards advanced features such as "AA " lines, includes the Nvidia Control Panel a set of additional configuration options as well as ready-made for various professional applications profiles. Nvidia offers drivers for Windows, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Linux, and for the Macintosh platform, there is Apple now also Quadro models.
Since the advanced features of the Quadro series are only used for special applications, such as MCAD, the imposition of a use of a Quadro graphics card for gaming and normal office applications not worth it. For professional 2D area (image processing, multihead applications in medicine, Exchange, etc) but Nvidia offers Quadro NVS series of powerful 2D GPUs. The sole board partners for the Quadro series is the company PNY, which also supplies manufacturers of 3D workstations ( such as Hewlett- Packard, Dell, IBM, Lenovo and Fujitsu Siemens).
With the Quadro graphics cards NVIDIA competes with the FireGL series and the FirePro series from AMD and the now complete set of 3Dlabs Wildcat series.
Technical
The Quadros are professional graphics cards for special applications such as MCAD, simulation, visualization, animation etc. You control how other professional cards certified for many applications for many programs in this area necessary additional functions such as lines AA and Quadro cards.
The technical proximity to the GeForce series has led to different ways of modding to make the cheap GeForce expensive Quadro. In the Internet there are many guides on how to convert normal GeForce graphics cards in Quadro models by manipulation of the graphics card BIOS, but no longer works with newer models. There is also the possibility, via manipulation of the driver (so-called softmod ) to force the identification of the card as a Quadro and so unlock the advanced features. Older models can be converted by resoldering a few components in the Quadro version, but this is required due to the very small SMD components and multilayer boards electro technical experience and tools.