[Grayhouse]

Hey guys, just thought I'd try to get some people to weigh in on this. I'm looking to put some money into my rig and i was wondering what the major differences are between workstation cards and standard video cards are. Especially if I want to game and work (paint, model) on the same rig? Do I get two cards? A high end graphics card and a mid range workstation card?

Thoughts?

Cheers

G.

[Horus397]

It depends on how much you need OpenGL, or even really how much OpenGL you actually need. Everything I've read and experienced tells me that there's a small margin of gain you get from the "Pro" cards and usually that's so application specific that most users don't really get their money's worth. I assume the DCC part of your equation is more important than the gaming part, nevertheless unless you are using Maya and MudBox or maybe XSI it seems like the OpenGL boost won't be that important. Even then most workstations with mid level gaming cards have pretty decent performance with these apps and only slow down when high polycount/objects come into play (really very rare high counts that most users don't get to for most projects. Like full cities/blocks or some crazy high organic stuff.)

ZBrush has it's own display engine, Max uses Direct X and final renders are still generally done offline between the CPU and main system memory. I'm not totally sure how XSI displays in it's viewports, but I suspect that it's Direct X too. The bad thing about the workstation cards too is that they generally don't have the economizing software that gaming cards have that could actually be really helpful like dynamic tessellation.(granted, most 3D apps don't utilize these features, but if they were in the "Pro" drivers from the start companies like AD might incorporate the stuff into their apps.)

[clear-air-3d]

I can only offer my own personal experience of using two of the recent cards.

I specified my new workstation with a Nvidia 1GB 460GTX going along with the idea that the high end cards were a waste of money.

After a week of difficulties in Maya 2011, 3DS Max 2011 icluding crashes and problems choosing geometry I decided to swap out the 460 and ordered the new Nvidia Quadro 4000.

The difference was incredible. No problems and running stable. Choosing an manipulation geometry is a dream which means I can get on with creating without worrying if the card is going to crash my programs.

[Grayhouse]

I see there is some good and some bad to both. Maybe i will just invest in two. I wonder how workstation cards (like the quadro you mentioned) would handle gaming...

Thanks for the input!

[HNU]

you dont want a quadro card for gaming haha, i had a friend who tried, horrible horrible framerates. reason being quadro's are for precision modeling and rendering. More about math calculations and less about framerate. From what ive seen and i 100% agree with clear that Maya does not like lower end cards. It indeed runs better on the professional cards. 3ds Max however i have running fine on a Nvidia 7800 GS (laugh i know haha, upgrading soooooon). Also i tested Modo, mudbox and zbrush on the lower end cards they seem to work fine.

[carol189]

From what I recall from previous arguments is that workstation cards cannot handle games at all, and would end up performing horribly. I don't know much more.

[Nixellion]

Pro cards (say Quadros) can handle games, but they handle them a lot worse than gaming cards. I player SupCom2 on a QuadroFX 3800 after some tweaking in driver settings.

So, there are 2 main differences between Quadro and GeForce cards.

1. Drivers
2. Quadros are usually downclocked versions of GeForce cards with much more memory.

The goal of Quadros is to be as reliable as possible, and handle complex calculations. So they do. Actually they work slower then GeForce sometimes, but they do less mistakes in their calculations, and they work longer. Also they can handle some specific apps better, like there is a CAD driver for Quadro cards, which makes it faster with CAD, 3dsmax apps.

CUDA is faster on GeForce 690, but Quadro6000 has much more memory. So, while 690 works faster, 6000 can load more data to process.

Well... But the price difference made me choose 690, and yet i think it was a right choise.