Pro Graphics: Seven Cards Compared

[Guest]

Just got a new workstation dual quad core Xeon with a 30 inch monitor. I'm using Maya and the entire adobe suite. I tested 3 cards. NVidia Quadro FX4600. ATI 4870 X2 and the ATI 4850. The very expensive Quadro FX4600 was painfully slow with Maya and After Effects. The ATI 4870 X2 didn't like Maya but worked great with everything else. The ATI 4850 just rocks for under $200. All benchmarks aside, I've been doing 3D and 2D animated productions for a very long time and the best way to test hardware is to drive it. I was shocked to see how fast these game cards have become and couldn't justify the $1500 for the Quadro FX4600. I'd spent that extra money on memory or faster CPU's.

Hope this helps

 

[eodeo]

The very expensive Quadro FX4600 was painfully slow

You weren't using Vista while trying this, were you?

Thanks for sharing your impressions either way

 

[Guest]

I tried playing wow on a pc with this video card and it was god awful. I set all the graphics settings as low as they could go using this card and it still played terrible.

 

[ShadowFlash]

Having used both the 8800gt and my current FX1700 on one of our CAD/CAM workstations, I can say without a doubt, that the quadro is worth every penny. While I use Inventor and SolidWorks, my main use is a program called GibbsCAM used for programing CNC machining/turning centers. I've tried many "gaming" cards over the years and they all produce artifacting and imprecise rendering. The difference between being able to see the cutting tool paths rendered perfectly on the screen and just a game-like representation cannot be emphasized enough. With the FX1700, my cut-part render can easily show a difference of .0001" on the part, whereas on the 8800gt it appeared as the same path. Considering some parts take 40+ hours to machine, and material cost is well into the thousands, the advantage of this is impossible to live without. Before switching to quadros, I had no idea what I was missing.

For those who don't seem to understand the difference...gaming cards are optimized for speed (FPS) above all else allowing imprecise rendering to accomplish this. Workstation cards are optimized for perfect rendering while sacrificing ( greatly sometimes in heavy solid modeling ) speed.

It also should be mentioned that I saw all these dramatic improvements in a piece of software that did NOT have any specialized drivers, such as the ones available for AutoCAD or others.

 

[salman156]

I HAVE Quadro FX 5600 1.5 GB dedicated memory and i am also enjoying games with this card. i have played alot of DX 10 games and all of them run smoothly on my pc on the other hand i am also getting real view in solidworks 2011 with help of quadro 5600 ....
I concluded that my card is comparable to 9800GT or a little bit slower than gtx 260......