NVIDIA Sets New Price/Performance With New Quadro2 EX Workstation GPU

Santa Clara, CA – May 16, 2001 – Broadening the accessibility to its award-winning family of workstation products, NVIDIA® Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) announced today the Quadro2™ EX, a high-value, entry-level workstation graphics solution. The new Quadro2 EX complements the Quadro2 family of workstation solutions by combining NVIDIA´s professional-strength 2D and 3D performance, comprehensive application support and industry-leading quality at unprecedented price points.

"NVIDIA is broadening its product range to provide the right solutions for anyone using or delivering professional graphics," said Dan Vivoli, senior vice president of marketing at NVIDIA. "The Quadro2 EX is a potent combination of our latest graphics technology at an aggressive price point, offering a compelling entry-level workstation graphics solution for end-users looking for true professional-quality and performance."

The Quadro2 EX is powered by NVIDIA´s award-winning, second-generation workstation graphics technology with horsepower to drive up to 350 million pixels per second or 700 million texels per second¯making it the fastest workstation solution in its category. NVIDIA Quadro2 EX´s 350MHz RAMDAC enables vibrant images at resolutions up to 2048x1536. With 32MB of 128-bit SDR memory and 2.7 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth, the Quadro2 EX delivers real-time frame rates with 32-bit color at high resolutions.

The Quadro2 EX offers many advanced features for professionals, including NVIDIA´s Digital Vibrance Control™ (DVC) for fine-tuned workspace color adjustment, and the NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer™ (NSR) that enables single-pass advanced per-pixel shading operations. With industry-leading 2D performance, the Quadro2 EX is the ideal solution for corporate users and financial industry professionals looking for no-compromise stability and performance. The Quadro2 EX ships with NVIDIA´s unified driver architecture (UDA), which allows forward-and-backward as well as top-to-bottom compatibility, greatly reducing support costs by simplifying system maintenance. UDA is found only in NVIDIA technology. The Quadro EX´s power is unleashed by NVIDIA´s series of custom application drivers featuring key enhancements vital to graphics professionals, including the ELSA® MAXtremeTM driver for 3ds maxTM, the ELSA POWERdraftTM driver for AutoCADTM and the QuadroViewTM driver for professional MCAD 3D visualization.

The Quadro2 EX offers software optimizations and full certification support for a extensive list of professional applications, including 3ds max, AutoCAD, Catia™, I-DEAS™, Lightwave™, Maya™, Mechanical Desktop™, MicroStation™, Pro/Engineer™, Softimage™, Solid Edge™, Solidworks™, Unigraphics™ and many more.

NVIDIA´s Quadro2 solutions not only support Windows® 98 and Windows 2000 operating systems, but are also binary-compatible with NVIDIA´s consumer products. As such, Quadro2 solutions provide a single "develop and deploy" platform for workstation professionals, ensuring content developed using a Quadro2 solution will also run on other popular consumer graphics solutions utilizing NVIDIA chipsets. Quadro2 EX is expected to be available at retail and in systems from leading PC OEMs in May 2001.

source http://www.nvidia.com