Gaming vs. Professional Graphics Cards

[Dreyer]

Here's an article that shows exactly how to go about doing the softmod to convert a GeForce into a Quadro. It also includes some benchmarking showing the performace increase on several applications.

http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=539&pgno=0

Of particular interest (to me, at least), was the almost 300% increase in SolidWorks performance from the original card to the softmodded one. However, it get's better. On the last page, it compares an unmodded card's performance, to a softmodded card, and then to an actual Quadro card. It still showed a 200% increase in Solidworks performance between the softmodded card and stepping up to an actual Quadro.

Other programs had varying amounts of impact, some little or none, but since the system I'm building will be mainly used for SolidWorks, I'm getting a Quadro FX-1800 (~$400). Maya, OTOH, showed little or no improvement.

What's the point ?
The GeForce 8800 GTX and the Quadro FX 1700 are both priced at around 250 USD, but the FX 1700 perform 2 to 3 times better.
Why all the trouble to get a much inferior performance ?

 

[johnnyB96000]

i'm tending to disagree with people saying that theyre simply an upgraded version of consumer counterparts. take the 6000 series of the quadros now. They have low clock speeds at 500+ mhz while a gaming counterpart is usually 850 or so mhz as in the NVIDIA geforce8000 series (although the the ATI HD5970 is only 725Mhzand the predecessor HD 5870 is 850Mhz. Number of stream processors are usually higher in consumer cards, 3200 in the ATI HD5970 compared to 1200 in the latest FireproGL card V8800.The architecture nowadays for these cards allows them to incorporate 6GBs of ddr5 Ram and still run in SLi. But this card only just surpasses the huge number of polygon processing of the the ATI HD5970, which is the fastest consumer card so far.

The professional cards dont go well suited to games, there is hardly any performance boost on some aspects, and consumer cards will generally out perform them. In addition they dont perform as good using directx but rather prefer the openGL API. especially the quadro 6000 that now runs the newest openGl 4.0.

People in medical imaging, and movie making would prefer to use these to extract huge performance from these cards. Also the deciding factor in most things is money. A 5970 may cost around $600US or 1000 for those ASUS higher clocked beasts. While a new quadro will set you back a cool $4999US

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey