a 15k video card?

OK my FRIEND believes that there is a professional video card that cost about 15k us dollars, He SAID that its a lot more powerful then a quadro4, fireGL, matrox. ME being a video card junkie never heard of something like that. He states that its those cards that are for high end products which i dont believe anyways. SO i am here to ask all u smart ass *with respect hehe* is there a video card out there that guru does not review that is higher then the quadro4, fire gl, and some matrox card?

 

my friend now changes his MIND and says "what is the highest end video card used by supercomputers that creates things such as full length movies? cards that are used by advanced corporations or something" he says that he MENT it was sopossed to beat a quadro not quadro4 it was 3 years ago buth e forgot watever the name was, someone he knew had it. BS i say if he changed what he said to this its gonna be harder to prove him wrong well i am not even sure wtf he is saying anymore.

 

YES, there are cards like that, actually (even though your friend ammended his views)...

As for not being presented by Guru3D, I wouldn't be so sure... Hilbert did present a high-end 3D development card about a year ago that retails for about 4000 Euro...

As for the card your friend mentions, I can only imagine he means a new system which wouldn't even fit into your pc (the length takes up 1 1/2 full-slot lengths)... A motherboard specific to these measures runs for around 2000 - 4000 Euro and are built by companies such as SIEMENS (which, as we all know, does not "really" manufacture mobos)...

If you want to know who uses these cards:

ILM
SGI
Blue Sky Studios
Dreamworks SKG
Pixar
etc..., etc..., etc....

 

well, there are a few 1.5k professional cards that I know of. I've never heard of a 15k video card. I'm guessing your friend is just full of it.

 

OK, here's a tiny detail about cards like that though - they are NOT merely 3D accelerators...
Generally these cards have compositing and videoprocessing gpus installed, as well as direct DV input devices (multiple firewire ports, accelerated direct video in / outs, and often come with ASIO supported audio systems...
These cards retail anywhere between 4000 and 10000 Euro (ok, haven't seen one for 15K, granted). These cards would suck as far as games are concerned, as they don't calculate geometry in the same fashion. However, they can achieve blazing speeds of almost 100M vertex scans (what you would call polygons in games, I guess) in real-time.

As I mentioned above - they would NOT fit in your pc or any other "of-the-rack" pcs... Plus, you wouldn't know what to do with them, as they are generally software-specific (i.e. professional software optimisation). Windows would probably ask you what the hell you are doing if you placed one of them in your system (if you could)... Thus, it shouldn't surprise you that they are generally bundled with drivers for UNIX only...

 

hehe ya these thing are freag'n huge...i was brousing and saw some that are some gpu's and about a mile of ram, not incluuding the cooling boards that accompany this. monsters. ram modules the whole thing..eepa.

 

Exactly...

Largest amount of RAM I've seen on one of those is 2 GB... That's a compositing card that can sample up to 40 minutes of uncompressed video on memory...


Think of it - that's almost one hour of full-quality video that you can edit _on the fly_... You can bet that is worth a couple Grand to a professional movie-editting company...

 

that WOULD be nice..

 

how much is that 3D Labs card?

 

C R A P! damnit this means my friend wins, he mentioned something about a bunch of ins and outs for the video *15 monitor support?* something else he mentioned ahhh he wasn't exact he guessed around 15k 3 years ago to be exact. Wow i guess i dont know all my video cards history then

 

AHHH he is gonna rub it in if he reads this thred

 

Akira - your friend IS right, but he is also WRONG...

These cards don't generally run unter the tag of graphics processing units (single-chip), as they usually are multi-chipped and each chip has a different task. As such, these cards can not really be compared with standard gpus - after all, they serve a completely different function. If we were going to stick strictly to a "graphics card" then, no, there aren't any that exceed the 2K mark. BUT, there are these other cards that are multi-function that can contain up to 4 gpus, 2 vertex processing units, 1 compositing unit, 1 color coding unit, 1 keyframing unit, up to 6 banks of memory (correct me, anyone, if the 8 bank cards are out already)... Of course, placing all of this hardware on a 1 1/2 sized full-length card, has a price... And that's why they end up running a price tag of (I checked on one today) 11,250 Euro (roughly 12, 000 US$)...

Another example (which you can find easily on the net) are framegrabbers. Matrox makes a couple of them and one of their models, the Genesis, retails for $8,995. The Corona-II is a cheaper module (runs for 1500 - 3000 US$) and has integrated G450 chipsets:

As you will notice from the pic, these things ARE big...


P.S. I used Matrox, as this is a company pretty much everyone knows... A lot of these cards are manufactured by relatively unkown (except in the industry) companies...

 

While trying to find a genlock, I found a picture that I thought you would like to see as well... This, for example, is one of the really high-end multifunction cards. As you will notice, it's not even one card, but three (although the functionality incorporates them all into one)... To my knowledge, this thing runs for about 9000 US$ (yes, it does outperform your run-of-the-mill videocard ...

 

I have a card for sale, a snip at £100,000

 

And yet another one:




@glidefan: i know this is the pub, but where else would you go with this? Can't really put it in the NVIDIA or the ATI sections, can we?

 

I guess you could put it in General Hardware.....but c'mon, nobody can actually afford these things so it really doesn't matter.

 

those quantum cards are sweet

 

Well, it isn't really "general" hardware, is it?


I guess individuals wouldn't really buy that, but I used to work at a company where I got to work with a Matrox Genesis, as well as the VideoToaster 2... Them things definitely are nice (unfortunately, way out of the price range for my own business )...