I can tell you from personal experience from using a quadro k5000m, quadro 6000 and Firepro w8000 that there is a huge difference depending on individual tasks.
For pure viewport, I believe the k5000 to be the best but Nvidia has a new compute strategy which is that they stripped all the capability from the quadro and say you need a tesla k20 to pair with it. The cost of the tesla gpu card is north of $3000 on its own.
In maya, simulations use the compute power (water,hair, wind etc). In theory, pairing a quadro and tesla should let you run realtime simulations but in practice, neither maya or any other autodesk product works with the tesla natively. You then become left with a card with no compute capability and no way of buying one that works. The case studies for maya and Maximus on the nvidia site use plug ins that are not available to the public and not supported in anyway.
The last generation of quadro had good viewport and compute capability. As does the latest generation of amd cards but as all the other answers correctly stated, the driver support is inferior making it hard to consistently take advantage of what should be superior hardware at a lower cost.
This is why you are seeing such variation from one review to the next. Toms hardware say the w8000 is the best card ever, while others show it not being able to match the last generation of quadro. Drivers are 80%. Both companies could have achieved the same performance gains over the previous generation with better software support but that sells less cards.
I sold my latest generation cards for this reason. For all the spec improvements the cards had, I couldn't see the benefit in real world use. 3 times as many cuda cores and the same or worse performance. I tried many combinations of hardware and drivers. In the end, I bought a used quadro 6000 off eBay for $1000 and once I has installed the right drivers and reinstalled maya, I had the best overall performance with the least amount of hassle.
While I think the w8000 is generally inferior, it has the advantage of being one of the only pro cards that can also play games well if that is your thing. I got the quadro and a gtx 680 for around the same price however. I run virtual machines to keep the, separate.
That is a long way of recommending the quadro k5000 if you don't need compute and a used quadro 6000 if you do. Btw, compute and gpu rendering are not the same thing although some people use the term interchangeably. The quadro k5000 is good at hardware rendering a scene. Just not viewing a hair simulation in realtime.
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