NVIDIA Quadro 4000 vs Quadro P600

Fewer number of ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines) on the NVIDIA Quadro P600 is more than outweighed by higher graphics clock rate, as a consequence it has significantly higher pixel fillrate. Having better pixel fillrate allows the GPU to draw more pixels on screen and off screen, which is beneficial for some 3D effects in games, or when playing at higher display resolutions.

Another important factor, that influences overall card performance, is texture fillrate. This parameter is defined as the number of TMUs (Texture Mapping Units), multiplied by graphics frequency. Even though the Quadro P600 has fewer Texture Mapping Units (TMUs), it is clocked substantially higher, which means its texture fillrate is considerably higher. Better texture fill rate allows the GPU to utilize more complex 3D effects and/or map more textures to each textured picture element, which improves visual appearance of games and generated images.

Maximum Single Precision performance, measured in GFLOPS or billions of Floating Point Operations Per Second, illustrates how fast the card is at executing programs, that process only single-precision floating point data. Since FP calculations are performed by shaders, stream processors or CUDA cores, the performance is directly proportional to their number. Processor clock rate also affects it. The NVIDIA Quadro P600 graphics card is significantly faster here. Higher single-precision performance number means the GPU will perform better in general computing applications. Since CUDA cores or stream processors are also used as vertex and geometry shaders for 3D image generation, higher performance is also beneficial to games.

To speed up processing, the graphics cards store 3D scene data, textures and intermediate data, used for image generation, in on-board memory. The video memory usually has much higher bandwidth than system RAM, and more bandwidth allows the card to run at higher screen resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. Memory type, speed, and width of memory interface all affect the bandwidth value. Specifically, higher memory bandwidth of the Quadro 4000 is due to wider memory bus.