Quadro NVS 420 vs FirePro D500

Place in the ranking	427	1322
Place by popularity	not in top-100	not in top-100
Cost-effectiveness evaluation	no data	0.01
Power efficiency	2.71	0.53
Architecture	GCN 1.0 (2011−2020)	Tesla (2006−2010)
GPU code name	Tahiti	G98
Market segment	Workstation	Workstation
Release date	18 January 2014 (10 years ago)	20 January 2009 (15 years ago)
Launch price (MSRP)	no data	$131.43

Cost-effectiveness evaluation

Performance to price ratio. The higher, the better.

no data

Detailed specifications

General parameters such as number of shaders, GPU core base clock and boost clock speeds, manufacturing process, texturing and calculation speed. Note that power consumption of some graphics cards can well exceed their nominal TDP, especially when overclocked.

Pipelines / CUDA cores	1536	8
Core clock speed	725 MHz	550 MHz
Number of transistors	4,313 million	210 million
Manufacturing process technology	28 nm	65 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	274 Watt	40 Watt
Texture fill rate	69.60	4.400
Floating-point processing power	2.227 TFLOPS	0.0224 TFLOPS
ROPs	32	4
TMUs	96	8

Form factor & compatibility

Information on compatibility with other computer components. Useful when choosing a future computer configuration or upgrading an existing one. For desktop graphics cards it's interface and bus (motherboard compatibility), additional power connectors (power supply compatibility).

Interface	PCIe 3.0 x16	PCIe 1.0 x16
Length	279 mm	no data
Width	2-slot	1-slot
Supplementary power connectors	no data	None

VRAM capacity and type

Parameters of VRAM installed: its type, size, bus, clock and resulting bandwidth. Integrated GPUs have no dedicated video RAM and use a shared part of system RAM.

Memory type	GDDR5	GDDR3
Maximum RAM amount	3 GB	256 MB
Memory bus width	384 Bit	64 Bit
Memory clock speed	1270 MHz	700 MHz
Memory bandwidth	243.8 GB/s	11.2 GB/s

Connectivity and outputs

Types and number of video connectors present on the reviewed GPUs. As a rule, data in this section is precise only for desktop reference ones (so-called Founders Edition for NVIDIA chips). OEM manufacturers may change the number and type of output ports, while for notebook cards availability of certain video outputs ports depends on the laptop model rather than on the card itself.

Display Connectors

6x mini-DisplayPort, 1x SDI

No outputs

API compatibility

List of supported 3D and general-purpose computing APIs, including their specific versions.

DirectX	12 (11_1)	11.1 (10_0)
Shader Model	5.1	4.0
OpenGL	4.6	3.3
OpenCL	1.2	1.1
Vulkan	1.2.131	N/A
CUDA	-	1.1

Gaming performance

Let's see how good the compared graphics cards are for gaming. Particular gaming benchmark results are measured in FPS.

Pros & cons summary

Performance score	10.84	0.31
Recency	18 January 2014	20 January 2009
Maximum RAM amount	3 GB	256 MB
Chip lithography	28 nm	65 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	274 Watt	40 Watt

FirePro D500 has a 3396.8% higher aggregate performance score, an age advantage of 4 years, a 1100% higher maximum VRAM amount, and a 132.1% more advanced lithography process.

NVS 420, on the other hand, has 585% lower power consumption.

The FirePro D500 is our recommended choice as it beats the Quadro NVS 420 in performance tests.

Should you still have questions concerning choice between the reviewed GPUs, ask them in Comments section, and we shall answer.