Updraft :
My NVidia Quadro FX1700 just died. While there are many approved cards on SolidWorks' site I was wondering if anyone has a good comparison so I can make a good bang/buck decision. Years ago when I bought this card I saw such a comparison (I thought on this site) that lead me to the conclusion the 1700 was a lot of card for the money.
Thanks in advance.
- - -Dennis
I know Tom's Hardware did an article a little whiles back comparing different cards, both workstation and gaming, for professional applications (although I don't have the exact link).
Nvidia's workstation line, Quadro, and gaming line, GeForce, are actually based off of the same chips. The only real difference is that Quadro has special drivers, sometimes optimized for different professional applications (whereas GeForce drivers are typically optimized for games), Quadro cards have buffered memory which helps reduce memory errors, and Quadros have much better double-precision compute performance (due to an artificial handicap Nvidia puts on the gaming cards, with the exception of the Titan and Titan Black Edition).
If SolidWorks is using your video card purely to render your viewport, I'd just go with a GeForce card, as they give you a whole lot more bang for your buck when it comes to simply rendering scenes.
However, if you're using any CUDA or OpenCL accelerated features of SolidWorks, I might consider a Quadro, as you get better double-precision compute performance, and the buffered memory reduces the chance of compute errors. Also, Quadros have physically more memory space, so if you're working with large GPU-run computations, or ridiculously complex assemblies, Quadro might be your way to go.
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