Workstation Cards

[joet1337]

Hey,

After doing some research I've learned that the only real reason to buy a Quadro or Firepro card is for the drivers that come with them, they are specialized to run with programs like Maya, 3DS Max etc.
Essentially they are just used to display geometry in the view ports, they can handle much higher amounts of geometry then non-specialized cards.


They are not used for rendering unless your using nvidia's iray, which seems to be, from what I have seen pretty rare. I think (correct me if I'm wrong) CPU rendering with mental ray is much more widely used and effective.

So my question is, is it really worth getting a Quadro or a Firepro over a GeForce or Radeon? Nothing I make in Maya for video games reaches even near 20k polygons... I'd rather invest my money in a good cpu rather than waste it on gpu I wouldn't be fully utilizing.

- Joe

 

[PapaCrazy]

Most 3d animators/modelers I know working from their own personal systems have gamer cards. The design studios I worked at with small 3d groups (not animation studios) gave animators the same computers they gave everyone else, which were usually Mac Pros with ATI gamer cards. I have an OCed GTX 560Ti in my PC and I went with Nvidia because of the mercury playback engine in Adobe Premiere. 560Tis are not officially supported, but can be hacked. I'd probably go with a GTX580 if I had to to do it over to avoid the hack, but I'm quite happy with the performance I'm getting all around. I've rendered out thousands of frames in Maya, some renders over 24hrs, with complex lighting, transparency, and fluids, and it's gone off without a hitch 98% of the time. I won't say I never had a crashed render, but crashes were rare and never brought any project to a screeching halt. My 16gb RAM limitation seems to be more of an issue for stability, as its been maxed out a few times by Maya, and has coincided with a crash. I tend to use software render over hardware or mental ray though, which I think burdens the CPU more. I think the market for the quadro cards are corporate-run studios and large animation houses that have the money to pay for rock solid stability. That stability mostly comes from drivers as you mentioned but quadro cards also have massive (up to 6 gb) memory, which can handle larger scenes. But it doesn't make sense to get a workstation card without 1st having a workstation mobo, ECC RAM, 32-64gb of RAM, and solid CPU(s). And still the benefit of that kind of setup is debatable if you aren't rendering out an entire village, town, battle scene, Toy Story 2, etc. The ideal customer for Quadro cards is Pixar, not freelancers on budgets.


Also, oddly enough, my GTX560Ti outperforms alot of Quadro cards in OpenGL. I get 62fps, I've seen a Quadro5000 benchmark @ 45. If you rely on OpenGL heavily (cinema4d does,I think) than ATI is a better way to go. Nvidia loves proprietary money-gouging tactics, and has ignored OpenGL, which I think is unfortunate. The best Nvidia cards for OpenGL, competitive with ATI, were the GTX400 and GTX500s. Also keep in mind that GTX600s are crippled for computation, and don't make good cards for rendering. From some accounts I've heard of a CPU vs. GTX680 for straight speed, the CPU was actually faster. GTX400/500 were the last everyman card by Nvidia.

 

[joet1337]

Best answer selected by joet1337.