Professonal Graphics in Gaming

[N4g4rok]

I'm putting together a rig for someone who does video encoding and 3D animation. He says he's using Maya, AutoCAD, Sony Vega Pro, and a few Adobe apps in his daily work flow.

The GPU we've picked out is AMD's FirePro 5800. He wanted to know how well it could play games if he decided to buy a couple. I honestly have no idea.

How well do professional cards perform in games in comparison to typical discrete GPUs?

 

[Jaydip]

They suck mostly.I have worth 4000$ quadros gpu in my office desktop and they are no better than a 500$ gaming card.But if the game requires some heavy duty computing tasks it will do fairly well.They can definitely game just not that efficiently and vice versa.

 

[Topweasel]

Generally pretty close to their desktop counterparts. The cheaper the Firepro the lower they clock them though, in a workstation enviroment they can price things a little better and they don't want to take the chance that a $500 Firepro can compete with a $1200 one.

So for example the Firepro 5800 is a workstation version of the 57xx Radeon line, but is clocked ~20% less then it. Stock 5770 is 850MHz, the FP 5800 is 690MHz. Same thing on the memory 5770 is 1.2 GHz, FP 5800 is 1GHz.

In games its a direct translation. On the workstation side the OpenGL and OpenCL allowances in driver and hardware cause even the crappiest Firepro to stomp on a 5770.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_v3800_v5800&num=1

 

[N4g4rok]

Are they stable? Nothing finicky with the difference in applications?

 

[3DVagabond]

Pro drivers don't have any gaming optimizations done to them. They can vary anywhere from good, if the game doesn't require any special optimizing, to poor, if it does.

The 5800 is a really good card though for the apps he uses. Not the best, but still very capable.

I wonder if anyone's managed to soft mod a 6900 with a 7900 BIOS? You might check around the web to see. If they have then a 6950 could give you both with a flip of the BIOS switch?

 

[RavenSEAL]

Quadro > FirePro, specially with Adobe products since they use CUDA cores.

 

[3DVagabond]

Quadro > FirePro, specially with Adobe products since they use CUDA cores.

It depends on which apps he uses. The CS6 "Mercury Graphics Engine" works with all GPU's. Even Intel. Amazingly, it now works with as little as 256mb of RAM, too.

 

[OVerLoRDI]

Is it just a lack of driver support that stops people from using say a normal 5770 vs a FP 5800 for professional graphics? What does a FP 5800 offer over a 5770?

 

[3DVagabond]

You will often see different outputs or more RAM on some models of pro cards. Driver support is what you buy pro cards for mostly, though.

 

[Topweasel]

Is it just a lack of driver support that stops people from using say a normal 5770 vs a FP 5800 for professional graphics? What does a FP 5800 offer over a 5770?

There are OpenGL functions for pro environments that don't work on the standard driver. This kills its performance on a workstation.

 

[bononos]

Is it just a lack of driver support that stops people from using say a normal 5770 vs a FP 5800 for professional graphics? What does a FP 5800 offer over a 5770?

Its ATI/AMD is segmenting the market with its pro/gaming card categories. Softmodding(hacked drivers) a gaming card doesn't give pro-level performance, so theres probably something a little more involved(some HW level differences maybe) even if both cards look identical in their layout.

 

[cantholdanymore]

I just ran unigine's Heaven yesterday and got 13FPS and a score of 330

 

[OVerLoRDI]

Its ATI/AMD is segmenting the market with its pro/gaming card categories. Softmodding(hacked drivers) a gaming card doesn't give pro-level performance, so theres probably something a little more involved(some HW level differences maybe) even if both cards look identical in their layout.

Interesting. They must fuse off some parts off the core in the gaming cards.

 

[N4g4rok]

I just ran unigine's Heaven yesterday and got 13FPS and a score of 330

How does that scale for games? The 7950 gets ~55 according to Anand. If it's that simple of a comparison, it won't be awesome news for him.

 

[cantholdanymore]

How does that scale for games? The 7950 gets ~55 according to Anand. If it's that simple of a comparison, it won't be awesome news for him.

Sorry I don't really game but I think it depends on the game.

 

[Cerb]

Interesting. They must fuse off some parts off the core in the gaming cards.

They do, either that way, or by the BIOS (for instance NV's low DP FP performance on consumer cards is entirely artificial). Those functions, however, mean basically nothing except to applications running ages-old incrementally improved OpenGL code. Likewise, there are many OpenGL functions that can be interpreted different ways, and which universally get a low-quality implementation outside of the pro drivers.

Unfortunately, the last last two sentences above basically describes almost the whole pro graphics application market, except for AutoCAD and Microstation (which even work with Intel IGP, for certain cost-driven definitions of work). Over the next decade, I very much hope that, like x86 servers, RAS will be the defining difference, not having certified and optimized drivers for your target markets. OpenCL, DirectCompute (HLSL), and HLSL/GLSL offer the opportunity to make vendor- and driver-independent implementations of renderers (that still maintain known quality), provided the specs are properly implemented. GLSL, at least, has started getting some use, too.