Quadro question

[yh125d]

I'm putting together a PC parts list for my Pre-Engineering teacher. It will have a e6600, 2g ram, etc. It will be used mostly for research on the web, as well as fairly intense 3d graphic design using Autodesk Inventor. He insists on having a quadro fx 3500($800-900) because supposedly they're better for graphic design. I told him he'd be better off getting a 8800gts or gtx and saving a couple hundred. Are there really any gains from having a quadro card? Both cards support OpenGL 2.0, so shouldn't the 8800gtx perform better?

 

[Matthias99]

The 'Pro' cards (NVIDIA Quadro/ATI FireGL/3DLabs Wildcat) have BIOS and drivers optimized for the kind of workloads that 'professional' 3D applications use. They may also support special features (such as optimized AA wireframe modes) that the 'gaming' cards don't. In the past, there were sometimes significant hardware differences between the various product lines. These days, though, the hardware tends to be the same and it's just a differently optimized BIOS and drivers.

Depending on the exact cards and application in question, and the kind of workload you are looking at -- yes, the Quadro FX3500 may outperform the 8800GTX. However, the FX3500 is based on the GF7 hardware, so it's possible that the 8800GTS/GTX might outperform it in some cases simply due to having more brute force available. You'd really need to find someone who has benchmarked them both in professional apps (or at least something like SPEC ViewPerf).

 

[JonnyBlaze]

Gaming cards are limited on the number of accelerated windows they can have open at once. Once you pass that limit they slow to a crawl. You probably wont ever hit the limit and if you do just close a window or 2. The gaming card should work fine. I work with Inventor daily and suggest 3gb or better on the ram. Inventor supports the /3g switch in boot.ini so if you had 4 gigs, Inventor could use 3 and you have 1 left for the os / other apps.

Inventor 2008 supports Direct X (for vista) but I don't know if thats a good thing or bad thing in terms of performance.

 

[lambchops511]

personally,

from specialized OpenGL custom apps

I find the optimized drivers for the Quadro cards to be much better than the gaming cards

 

[Lord Banshee]

Well autodesk inventors website says it uses openGL and DirectX... They question is does your professor use it under OpenGL or DirectX?

Some application suck in DirectX, except for 3dsmax, because they were originally written for OpenGL. I have never used Inventor so i have no clue. But if he is using OpenGL in Inventor the Quadro will most likely kill the Geforce due to the Driver optimization only. Another thing is that due to this anti-optimization on the gamer cards driver there are sometime artifacts in the viewports of the applications.

I say play it safe and get the fx3500 which is a very good workstation card ( i wish i had one).

Also don't forget to stay with WinXP Pro, search my search about Vista and CAD.. there is about 25% loss in performance with the crappy drivers that are out right now.