I am always amazed at how many people claim to be using a mainstream, gaming card in a professional application like Maya. I have tried Maya with an Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT and while it works for awhile, the display eventaully corrupts and becomes un-responsive, forcing a restart of Maya. This might be fine for those messing around with 3D at home, modeling anime girls to put in fantasy poses (you know what I'm talking about), but this kind of performance is unacceptable in a professional environment.
The mainstream gaming cards are made to keep a constant framerate, at the expense of accuracy, during game play. Who cares if the grass or trees are rendered a few pixels off of where they should be.
I've used nVidia and ATI/AMD workstation cards with Maya, and they BOTH have driver problems. I will say the nVidia cards feel more stable and solid, but the price difference is worth considering, even with the extra problems I encountered on the ATI side.
The current ATI card I have did not work properly with Maya for about 6 months. I was constantly in touch with the development team at ATI trying to solve these issues. They were responsive and helpful, and eventually all the bugs were solved through new driver releases. I had access to beta drivers as well. This support is part of the cost.
nVidia is hot right now because they have teamed up with Adobe to push the strength of CUDA into CS5 Premiere and AfterEffects for rendering video edits and effects. AMD seems to have shyed away from the workstation arena.
Maybe Tom's Hardware can do a test of workstation vs. gaming cards in each category to put this debate to rest, either way. I'd be thrilled to not have to drop 2 grand on a workstation class card. Send a bunch of cards to me. I'll test 'em good!
Anyway, great review. This was very helpful to me, as we are considering upgrading to the new Quadro 5000, once they are certified for Maya by AutoDesk. I was confused by the new naming (dropping the FX) since nVidia had a Quadro FX 4000 a long time ago...which may have even been an AGP (remember that?) card.