Nvidia Takes Fermi to Entry-Level Professionals

[Darkv1]

If these cards perform well I can see a few of my friends being all over them at that pricepoint.

 

[rpgplayer]

if AMD and nVidia made the exact same card, the only difference being the drivers. the nVidia one would beat the AMD one. AMD drivers plain suck, and if you use linux it's even worse.

 

[teknic111]

Drivers/small hardware change. Still have not found a GREAT article or anything that explains it, but in general, it is the drivers, and a small hardware change that some people can imitate by "soft-modding" a gaming GPU. All in all, gaming GPUS do not do well in applications that workstation GPUs excel at, and vice versa. Different beasts. high rpm-low torque vs. low rpm-high torque (possible analogy?)

I don't understand this. The architecture of both cards are the same and the gaming cards have over twice the amount of cuda cores for about a $100 less. I'd like a more definitive answer as to what makes these cards better for business.

 

[dalauder]

Can someone benchmark the GTX 460 against the similarly priced Quadro 600 on workstation performance? It's 336 cuda cores v 96. Does a little bit of tweaking make that big of a difference or is there another performance point I'm missing?

 

[jecastej]

[citation][nom]teknic111[/nom]I don't understand this. The architecture of both cards are the same and the gaming cards have over twice the amount of cuda cores for about a $100 less. I'd like a more definitive answer as to what makes these cards better for business.[/citation]

Professional 3D applications are optimized (the drivers) to move very heavy geometries at relatively low fps with basic shaders and gaming cards are optimized for shader power, fast fps and now with an increasing geometry complexity, but not with a vital precision. Even they use the same hardware, the Pro apps use the resources for different task. The goal in pro 3D apps is geometry first as if you are drawing a very complex building or industrial model you need to see the mesh (geometry) with great precision and detail and you only need basic shader resources for a simple solid rendering in the viewport. Professionals don't need to see beautiful and complex shaders on screen at 30-60 fps as when the models are finished they are exported for rendering purposes to more specialized software/hardware rendering engines and machines. Usually a studio of engineers know very little on how to create complex shaders for rendering purposes. They know about structures, forces or angles. And the same happens with architects, they need color only to differentiate one structure to another. When the high precision mesh is ready it goes to a different pipeline where the model is "cleaned" and prepared for rendering, if at all needed. This is accomplished usually by a different studio that has the shaders, textures, lighting and the rendering knowledge.

In the digital content creation DCC industry the modelers, programers, technical directors and even fx professionals usually wont see their work in all their glory when working. They will perform renderings but again not using the full rendering power as color is not even close to final in this levels. It is just when the model is ready when the lighting, texturing and shading process begins. But it wont end there. When the model is shaded and textured another specialist adjust the lighting of different objects separated and creates the illusion of light as a whole. So objects or models are rendered individually or in groups as layers, like in Photoshop. But is the composer in the post production level who is responsible for the final color and appearance of every frame. He receives the images in layers from the animation sequences and he/she composes and adjust these layers into one single picture. Even as the composer needs the shader power in the graphic card is for very high color precision of pre-rendered pixels and not for fast moving 3D objects. In this scenarios a professional needs 12 bit depth for every color channel plus alfa. Hence a 12 bit professional monitor with high color accuracy reproduction.

So, is the game industry mostly the one that needs superfast pixels and moving geometry at 30-60 fps. But in a game you wont care or even see bad pixels and geometry rendered with relative low precision as long as you are able to see your opponent and shoot first. Software drivers are given for gaming cards but in the professional world the drivers are so specialized they use different versions for specific software. This is certification.

One last thing is that these different Pro industries have a relative low volume demand and different specialized needs compared to the millions the gaming industry sells in a more unified world. But Pro studios and some professionals are willing to pay more for the particular features they need, usually very high precision, 3D stereo glasses, very specialized rendering features and a lot of on board memory, 2-4 gbs for very heavy geometry. And all this with Reliability so overclocked hardware is not a good idea if not extremely well implemented.

As everything is changing and evolving new 3D professional software is starting to use the great shading power from GPUs for high quality final renderings as is the case with Octane Render, using Nvidia's gaming hardware or MachStudio Pro, exclusive with AMD PRO GPUs. Still in its infancy and every single frame still needs seconds or minutes to render.

I hope I helped a bit to clear the difference between gaming and the darker professional side.

 

[kvarta]

[citation][nom]jecastej[/nom]Since the last 2 releases Nvidia is outperforming AMD on price and performance even on Autodesk Maya 2009 and 2010 and most professional applications, not a fan appreciation but pure facts. I did my research a year ago and went to Nvidia for an entry level Quadro 580. At that time Nvidia Quadro 580 was better on performance than the AMD near price option and offered 512 MB of memory, twice what AMD did. As a reference the new Quadro 600 is slightly better than the 580 in Maya (12.20 Vs 10.82) in Nvidia's own current Performance numbers. But I also read every other review and Nvidia was almost always better on every price. Is not obvious but there are specific scenarios and apps that work better on AMD professional cards so if you are planning to buy a professional card do a specific research and ask real users for the specific combination of software and hardware you want to get.And finally on real use for almost a year I can say the Q580 works really well and stable with Maya on Windows 7 and XP too. The new Maya version "2011" has a new and improved Rendering engine and this year more powerful graphic card options offer real advantages over less advanced and cheaper cards. But on this latest version I haven't read any performance review, just users comments.[/citation]

I don,t see continuos leadership, it's kind off jumping one over onother
http://hothardware.com/Reviews/ATI-FirePro-V8750-Workstation-Graphics-Card/?page=5
An yes, new generation of Quadros is faster, but an half year was faster FirePro. I am using Solidworks, and in Solidworks forums I see users more like ATI cards...

 

[dEAne]

I am using AutoCAD 2009 I will try this card.

 

[Anik8]

ah nvidia will surely be conquering the corporate section by the year's end