Workstation Shootout: Nvidia Quadro 5000 Vs. ATI FirePro V8800

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joebakb

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[citation][nom]marraco[/nom]For this kind of card, GPGPU benchmark is mandatory.Also, I'm curious, ¿How bad is at gaming?[/citation]

The equivalents are shown in the graphs if you read it. It's on the 'Comparison and Applications' page
 
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If you worked regularly with these kind of setup you will begin to appreciate what 'durability' mean, it does not pertain to how long these cards will last, the kind of people who buy these cards will already have some kind of special warranty plan to cover replacement of dead cards

durability means durability in workload, the kind of applications that will fully utilize these kinds of cards are resource hogs quite easily bringing the system to the brink of stability, you want a card (and driver by default) that would not tip the system over the brink of stability, all that power is all well and good but power is nothing without control, the cost of the card is nothing compared to losing hour after hour of work due to crashes and system instability, saving 1 min of render time means nothing if you had to reload your session 5 times over just to get to that point

these cards could really only ever be assessed based upon long term observation under real world conditions
 
[citation][nom]davefb[/nom]sort of interesting, but why is there no comparison to mainstream boards? There is a massive premium of cost here but nothing to be able to say 'hey boss, the onboard graphics we use really don't cut it any more, how about a quadro'.(or have I sped-read past the reason why )[/citation]

Because these boards are specifically designed and optimized to do 3D Rendering and processing. If you put a consumer board in there, it would get eaten alive.

And the same for these. Put these into a gaming competition and they would get eaten alive.

Besides, most people who will get a Quadro or Fire GL card are movie makers.
 

KT_WASP

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[citation][nom]Ciuy[/nom]AMD Drivers suck. I miss my Nvidia board, they released cool drivers every time.[/citation]


Really?

It is funny how everyone knocks ATI drivers the first chance they get. I admit, the complaints are not groundless.. but, how are Nvidia drivers that much better?

Do we forget the recent past of horrid Nvidia drivers that either locked out overclocking or fried your GPU due to bad fan drivers? It was so bad that Nvidia had to ask people to roll back to the previous driver set, which was also messed up. There was something like 3 or 4 bad driver sets in a row for Nvidia... that is pretty bad.

So, next time you start complaining about drivers from ATI, I can tell you that Nvidia has its fair share of problems in that area as well. I own cards from both and have had good and bad drivers from both.
 

liquidsnake718

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There is a misprint on the ATi firepro overview. Its on the list of firepro cards available and instead of MB for the memory (RAM) on the GPU/workstation card, it should be GB or gigabytes. Minor mistake but it will catch many off guard and smile for a second.
 

falchard

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I would say it really depends on what you use the card for. In enterprise tasks you have to do your research. There is never a clear winner as AMD does better in some apps and nVidia does better in others. I would say if you are using Maya like the majority of the 3D industry, you are going to be using a FirePro. The benchmarks between the 2 are not very different, but the FirePro uses 1 billion less transistors which makes it a cheaper card to buy and operate.
 

Thor

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I know they are not the same thing but I was curious to compare the Radeon HD 5970 to ATI FirePro V8800.

So I search and find:
http://hothardware.com/Articles/AMD-ATI-FirePro-V8800-Workstation-Graphics-Card/

It's strange to see that this «CAD» card is not for game.
Even if we must pay more than 2 time the price of Radeon 5970.
 

slimbones

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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.
 
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* ATI FirePro V8800 (2 MB GDDR5, Cypress XT / RV870)
* ATI FirePro V7800 (2 MB GDDR5, Cypress Pro / RV870)
* ATI FirePro V5800 (1 MB GDDR5, Juniper XT / RV840)
* ATI FirePro V4800 (1 MB GDDR5, Redwood XT / RV830)
* ATI FirePro V3800 (1 MB GDDR3, Redwood XT / RV830)
1 and 2 MB??!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!
Really? ATI really has sucked up up then because only 1 and 2 MB of GDDR5 is old school as heck, even if it is DDR5....

* i know its an error: MAJOR TOM TO GROUND CONTROL WE HAVE AN ERROR ON THE OVERVIEW PAGE !
 

Travis Beane

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So, you're telling me that the guy who's giving people MRI's and the such all day could be playing Crysis at on his work computer? I need to become a doctor.
[citation][nom]scrumworks[/nom]I'm sure you'll be hearing from AMD pretty soon publishing those kind of results.[/citation]
I'm hoping so. It might be interesting. :D
 

prestl

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PLEASE do some shootouts with workstation cards with some higher end gaming cards. I would like to see how they stack up. I am interested because I want to do gaming and HD video editing on my computer.
 

mikem_90

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Most of what you're getting is a certified platform in order to run programs like MAYA, AutoCAD, Pro/E, etc... Most of these companies only do their certification that they will run on the high end workstation boards, not the mainstream gaming ones. Theoretically you can, but they don't properly certify them, there are often bugs or problems.

It helps speed development, but also means that they can be sure you'll have accurate and reproduceable results when using these cards. If they had to venture into the gaming cards? bah.. insanity, too many cards that are on the edge, not fully stable.
 

duanes1967

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Wow - This has got to be a major driver issue. I must agree with others... I had an older AMD motherboard and constantly had problems with ATI card compatibility due to driver issues. I Switched to nVidia and haven't been back since.

AMD handed nVidia a $1 billion dollar smack down that has allowed them to leapfrog the Fermi development. But never under estimate the under dog. nVidia makes a quality product and they will one day return the favor.
 

gokulpanchal

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I have always preferred Nvidia when it comes to Graphic Solutions. And Nvidia cards has much more compatibility with the Graphics Intensive Applications.
 

xnashx

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I'm very suprised on much this cost. $1200-1700, i can't imagine myself spending this much for a video card. You must at the top tier of your companies salary to afford one of these.
 
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Maybe if Uwe cared to update both Nvidia and ATI drivers to their latest release (a release, say, around the same time or AFTER the Quadro 6000 was launched), we would see a more fair (and accurate) comparison.

8.723 is more than 4 months old (before ATI added their viewperf11 optimizations AND their 3dsmax performance driver). The difference between the drivers is almost 2 months.

We know where someone's loyalties lie. Opportunistic and well played sir.
 

husker

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The problem with the review is this (as I see it): The premium cost of these cards is explained to be the superior durability, support, and sheer toughness of being able to handle immense workloads thrust upon them by profession grade rendering applications. Fine. But then these qualities that are supposedly the hallmark of the cards are ignored in assessing their relative value. How do we know that ATI didn't purposely sacrifice speed for something more important, like rendering accuracy, or system stability?
 

jjohnphoto

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While we did not review the FX4000, FX5000 or FX6000, we did evaluated with CGArchitech the following cards: NVIDIA Quadro FX4800/3800/1800/580, ATI FirePro V8750/8700/7750/5700/3750, Radeon HD5870, GeForce GTX285/480 cards. While I apologize for sending you to another site, I believe it is pertinent to the discussion; so, with apologies, please check out the article through http://blog.renderstream.com/?p=803. In general we found the FX cards to outperform all the cards, though other cards on different tests would shine brightly.
 
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