NVIDIA Quadro 600 vs Quadro FX 1800

Despite of lower graphics frequency, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800 GPU comes with better pixel fill rate, thanks to many more ROPs. Better pixel fill rate allows more pixels to be drawn on screen per second, which results in increased card performance, unless there are bottlenecks in other areas, such as texture mapping or available memory bandwidth.

Although its graphics clock is slower, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800 has twice as many TMUs, which results in considerably higher texture fill rate. Better maximum texture fill rate means that the graphics card can utilize more complex 3D effects and/or map more textures to each texel, 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 good the GPU is at running programs, that use single-precision floating point numbers. All single-precision calculations are performed by CUDA cores or stream processors, therefore the more cores / processors the graphics unit has the better. Performance also depends on the processor clock speed. The NVIDIA Quadro 600 graphics card is faster here. Higher single-precision performance number means the graphics card will perform better in general computing applications. Since stream processors or CUDA cores are also used as vertex and geometry shaders for 3D image generation, higher performance is also beneficial to games.

Memory bandwidth parameter specifies how much memory (in Gigabytes) the GPU can read from or write to dedicated memory per second. Cards with higher memory bandwidth have better performance at high display resolutions, or when using large and detailed textures, and/or utilizing complex 3D effects and filters, like anti-aliasing. Memory type, speed, and width of memory interface all affect the bandwidth value. In this case, the Quadro FX 1800 comes with better memory design and wider bus. As such, it has higher memory bandwidth.