Quadro 4 750XGL/900XGL vs. GF4 4600

[IgoByte]

Hi folks,

I will need to build a couple of high-end graphics workstations, and at this point I'm wondering if I should dish out the money for the Quadro 4 cards or if I should go with the much cheaper GF4 4600 line.
These workstations are again for very high-end graphics creations, and I have to cover a broad field of applications, so it's not exactly application-specific.
The Q4 750XGL costs some $900 and the Q4 900XGL is about $1400 while the GF4 4600 is well under $400.

What should I buy?

 

[Shagga]

Bit of a coincidence this. A colleague at work has just bought a dual P4 2GHz ZEON's and also the nVidia Q4 750XGL . He is desperately disappointed in the performance in 3DS Max 4.0 and 3D VIZ 4.0 running this system. He was expecting it to kick the @ss of their P4 2.0GHz Single processor machines with Matrox G550's and it doesn't. In fact there was no difference. He's tried all the drivers etc but rendering in either 3DS MAX and VIZ there was no difference. Supprised me to.

However, He ran SpecViewPerf7 benchmarks and was supprised by the results. I wasn't to be honest but this is what he got.

Dual ZEON Setup with Q4 750XGL & 1 GHz of PC800 RDRAM.

3dsmax-01 weighted Geometric Mean = 8.822
drv-08 weighted Geometric Mean = 47.42
dx-07 weighted Geometric Mean = 68.19
Light-05 weighted Geometric Mean = 12.35
Proe-01 weighted Geometric Mean = 10.28
ugs-01 weighted Geometric Mean = 9.192

Single P4 2.0GHz with Matrox G550 & 1 GHz of PC800 RDRAM

3dsmax-01 weighted Geometric Mean = 0.9521
drv-08 weighted Geometric Mean = 2.337
dx-07 weighted Geometric Mean = 3.558
Light-05 weighted Geometric Mean = 2.094
Proe-01 weighted Geometric Mean = 0.8900
ugs-01 weighted Geometric Mean = 3.3966

From the benchmarks above he was stumped as to why SpecViewPerf7 benchmanrks were showing significant increases. But in 3DS MAX and 3D VIZ whilst rendering a model there was no difference!

So, he asked me to bench my system this weekend with SpecViewPerf and let him have the results. My system is -

P3 800MHz with 64MB ASUS GeForce3 and 1GHz of PC133 SDRAM

3dsmax-01 weighted Geometric Mean = 3.243
drv-08 weighted Geometric Mean = 13.24
dx-07 weighted Geometric Mean = 12.06
Light-05 weighted Geometric Mean = 3.808
Proe-01 weighted Geometric Mean = 3.430
ugs-01 weighted Geometric Mean = 2.807

So, It really at this stage depends on what applications your running. Oh yeah, ACAD r14 with AEC was no different in terms of realtime use in either of the machines above.

You have gotta be sure the 750XGL is for you by assessing which apps your going to use. 3DS MAX and 3D VIZ don't seem to make use of the Dual Processors and the 750GXP for some reason but SpecViewPerf did!!!!. He spent a fortune on it also. About £3,500 appx on the system and he is gutted.

Be careful is all I can say at this stage but I hope the above helps.

Good Luck

[edit]

Oh, yeah forgot to mention. A friend is going to run the same benchmark as above on his P4 1.8GHz Northwood with the ABIT Siluro (sp) GeForce 4600 on monday with any luck, which might be interesting for you. Oh, look. My P3 stuffed a P4!!...well OK.....my GF3 stuffed a G550....nothing new there then!...LOL

 

[IgoByte]

Thanks for the input, Shagga.

 

[Rand]

In all honesty I'd pass on the Quadro4 entirely, the specs look impressive.....
But real world performance has proven to fall behind many competing professional solutions in the same price range. Also, nVidia's driver support for the Quadro is relatively poor in comparison to that offered by 3DLabs for the WildCat II, and FireGL for the FireGL 2-4/8700/8000.
Also with nVidia's seemingly lackluster support for the Quadro series after the demise of Elsa it doesnt speak highly of their future chances.
They relied pretty heavily upon Elsa's engineers for much of the code that went into the Quadro drivers, and while they obtained a few former Elsa engineers they've yet to conclusively show they can offer the level of quality needed in the high end. The fact that they have precious little experience in the high end doesnt help much either.
There are only a handful of applications in which I consider the Quadro4 as being a viable competitor in it's price range.

I'd probably look towards the FireGL 8700-8800/FireGL2/WildCat II 5000.

Much of it depends on the applications and system setup... you mention the systems will be running a wide variety of applications in which case I'd probably lean towards FireGL 8700/8800 as the most multi-functional cards solid performance across the board.

If the systems are lacking in processor power though 3DLabs WildCat II 5000 may be a better option though, 3DLabs tends to deal rely much less on processor power, and their drivers are extremely efficiently optimized for SIMD instructions sets, and multiprocessing.

The GF4 Ti4600.... I really can't see much reason to use it as a high end rendering solution. An OEM FireGL 8700 is available at a comparable price point, and is doubtlessly a superior card in virtually all respects for high end rendering usage.

 

[miniMUNCH]

Wow...I learned a few new things from this thread! thanx

 

[IgoByte]

Thanks Rand...

The ATI FireGLs are a viable solution, however even the Q4 750XGL outperforms the GL2 by a wide margin. The 900XGL is quite a bit faster too. The $700 128MB ATI Fire GL 8800 gets killed by the Q4 750XGL, which is actually slightly cheaper. The FireGL4 128MB card costs around $1700, so it's definitely simply overpriced IMO. The Q4 900XGL can be had for about $1100.
As for performance, I haven't seen any tests, but I don't believe the GL4 actually outperforms the 900XGL.

As for all the rest, such as the WildCat or Oxygen cards, 3DLabs was just recently fully bought out by Creative Labs, and aside from the fact that these cards would be difficult to obtain brand new at this point, it's a huge risk IMO.

Elsa is definitely completely out of the game at this point...has been for a while...but PNY has taken up the Quadro line and seems to be doing a fine job...

 

[Rand]

The ATI FireGLs are a viable solution, however even the Q4 750XGL outperforms the GL2 by a wide margin. The 900XGL is quite a bit faster too. The $700 128MB ATI Fire GL 8800 gets killed by the Q4 750XGL, which is actually slightly cheaper. The FireGL4 128MB card costs around $1700, so it's definitely simply overpriced IMO. The Q4 900XGL can be had for about $1100.
As for performance, I haven't seen any tests, but I don't believe the GL4 actually outperforms the 900XGL.

As an all around card I can agree the FireGL2 isnt up to par with the Quadro4 series, but is still warrants mention IMHO because of it's exceptional performance in complex shading tasks and far better performance when rendering scenes with a large number of light sources. On the downside, it tends to require a lot of processing power to truly reach it's peak performance potential. I've long been a huge proponent of the FireGL 1-4 series, and the drivers are also exceptionally well tuned for performance.
There are still a few areas wherein the old FireGL performance shockingly well compared to more recent cards

My experience with the Quadro 4 750XGL isnt terribly positive and evidently quite the opposite of your experience with the card, in most tasks I've found it to be comparable to the FireGL 8700, and fall behind the FireGL 8800 the vast majority of the time. Architecturally it should be able to outperform for it, but in the real world it generally seems to fall slightly behind. This compounded with the numerous small bugs such as the issues with smooth blinn shading make it of dubious worth.
Plus with nVidia's existing driver team having very little experience with professional level driver design besides the handful of engineers obtained from Elsa I've little hope that the driver support will substantially improve anytime soon.
It's clear they've had tremdendous issues gaining ISV certification with their drivers of late.

PNY, I'll leave out of consideration as they quite clearly do not have the personnel to help with driver design, and they've virtually no experience with the requirements of professional level graphics cards.
[/quote]

As for all the rest, such as the WildCat or Oxygen cards, 3DLabs was just recently fully bought out by Creative Labs, and aside from the fact that these cards would be difficult to obtain brand new at this point, it's a huge risk IMO.

The Oxygen series is a mute point, it's old, and our-dated and performs extremely poorly for most tasks compared to modern solutions.
As for the WildCat series, I see no reason why the purchase by Creative has any impact. Creative has made it quite clear they intend to leave 3DLabs to their own devices in-sofar as the professional level rendering cards are concerned. Nor are they to have any input on the driver development for the existing WildCat series, so 3DLabs should be perfectly capable of continuing their long history of success in the market.

The WildCat III is always a possible option, but even the 6110 seems out of your price-range.

FWIW, I've never concerned myself overly much with Spec ViewPerf benchmark results. It's a synthetic benchmark that tests in only a few specific disciplies and doesnt tend to accurately reflect real world application specific driver enhancements very well.
It's respectable if one wants to measure the theoretical capabilities of the hardware, but I've never found it to be terribly accurate in the real-world.
This is only ,y personal opinion though, and there are certainly those that put great faith in SpecViewPerf results.

In any case, I would certainly spend the extra for the Q4 750XGL over the Ti4600.... sheer power allows the Ti4600 to perform comparable in a small handful of respects, but in the overwhelming majority of situations the lack of appropriate tuning in the base GF4 drivers put the 750XGL far ahead. The base GF4's also seem to have definitevely worse sub-pixel accuracy and texture precision relative to the more optimized Quadro models.

 

[IgoByte]

Appreciate it, Rand.

 

[Sunner]

If you want a few more oppinions, go ask at Beyond3D.
There are quite a few professionals posting there, or at least there was last time I spent any time there.

 

[IgoByte]

Thanks Sunner

 

[DiamondFire13]

this is a response to the first reply to this thread.

The video card will not increase rendering speed, only viewport performance, and only with OpenGL turned on. I would suggest that the person who posted that go back and check, the matrox card will never be able to beat the quadro, which is shown by the Spec tests. I am betting that Max is still in the Software Z Buffer mode, and that is greatly hindering your performance.

Paul

 

[Sunner]

Just in case the original author happens to look at this thread again, you might wanna check out the recent article at Ace's, called Professional Grade Revisited.

 

[IgoByte]

Of course. Thanks.

 

[IgoByte]

That reading was pretty useful, Sunner. Thanks!

 

[Mistyk]

Rand,

Your opinions regarding the Quadro 4 line are interesting. Up until I stumbled over this thread, I was set to go for a 900XGL. Now however, I will rethink that decision.

What are your thoughts on 3DLabs' recent line of midrange OpenGL cards based around the P10 VPU? It is targetted at the same market segment as is the Quadro 4 line. The P10-based cards received bad reviews, but perhaps you think it's still worth going for 3DLabs due to their experience in the professional field?

A Wildcat III is out of my reach, but would otherwise be a given winner.

Thanks in advance!