What makes a CAD/Modeling/Professional Video Card?

[CrazyHelloDeli]

What makes a professional grade graphics card so special? Ive searched google, card manufacturing companies and the like and cant really seem to pinpoint the differences between a GeForce4 TI vs a GeForce4 Quadro, or Radeon 9000 vs a FireGL 8800, other than a huge price. Anyone have a link about professional grade graphics cards and what make them "Professional". Thx.

 

[Shooters]

Details and accuracy. Generally speaking, professional 3D cards put less of an emphasis on speed and more on visual quality. This isn't to say that gaming cards neglect visual quality, but professional 3D cards don't need to pump out 60 fps and therefore can achieve a level of detail unmatched by any gaming card. The hardware and drivers are tweaked to produce and image that is as near to perfect as you can get. There was an issue of Maximum PC last year that talked about this topic and they showed a sample image rendered by two videocards. One was a professional 3D card and the other was a standard gaming card. The difference in visual quality was very apparent.

 

[Random Variable]

Professional video cards these days are consumer video cards that have been modified to work more efficiently with certain graphics programs.

3Dlabs is the exception, but their Wildcat 4 performs very poorly compared to the new Fire GL cards from ATi.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Vespasian
Professional video cards these days are consumer video cards that have been modified to work more efficiently with certain graphics programs.

3Dlabs is the exception, but their Wildcat 4 performs very poorly compared to the new Fire GL cards from ATi.

I was under the impression that when push comes to shove, say 3D modelling, with lots of light sources, etc, the Wildcats begin to pull quite the bit compared to FireGL's and Quadro's.
Also, has ATi cleaned up the visual quality yet?
I remember seeing a review over at Ace's, that compared the FireGL 8800(I think it was), Quadro 750XGL and a Wildcat, though I think the Wildcat was a WC III, and the ATi card had some image quality issues here and there.
The nVidia card had some too for that matter, while the Kitty did fine all the way.

 

[jbond04]

As far as I'm concerned, professional 3D graphics cards are a joke...especially for CAD. While they obviously provide benefits over consumer cards, they are not even close to the biggest productivity bottleneck in a system...at all. I use AutoCAD and 3ds Max extensively with high detail environments (2 million-plus polygon scenes), and there are a dozen other things I would rather spend my money on than a professional 3D card. A faster CPU, more memory, better software, good training/experience, and a good work ethic are all much more beneficial...

If you're dealing with a situation where you need greater pixel accuracy...zoom in. If you need more fps in a viewport window, buy a faster CPU and more memory, and make a preview. And if you need it to "work faster", learn how to use your software and work on smaller proxy models. If you have the money to spend, go ahead and drop it on a professional 3D card...it's not like it will be detrimental to your system. But keep in mind that there are a lot better things to spend your money on...and that awesome hardware won't make you an awesome animator/modeler/drafter/designer.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: jbond04
As far as I'm concerned, professional 3D graphics cards are a joke...especially for CAD. While they obviously provide benefits over consumer cards, they are not even close to the biggest productivity bottleneck in a system...at all. I use AutoCAD and 3ds Max extensively with high detail environments (2 million-plus polygon scenes), and there are a dozen other things I would rather spend my money on than a professional 3D card. A faster CPU, more memory, better software, good training/experience, and a good work ethic are all much more beneficial...

If you're dealing with a situation where you need greater pixel accuracy...zoom in. If you need more fps in a viewport window, buy a faster CPU and more memory, and make a preview. And if you need it to "work faster", learn how to use your software and work on smaller proxy models. If you have the money to spend, go ahead and drop it on a professional 3D card...it's not like it will be detrimental to your system. But keep in mind that there are a lot better things to spend your money on...and that awesome hardware won't make you an awesome animator/modeler/drafter/designer.

But then, compared to what you(as an employee) cost, the cost of even a very high end Pro card is neglible.
Of course, for an amateur doing CAD at home, the situation is quite different.

 

[jbond04]

I'm actually not employed by any company...I'm a freshman in Electrical Engineering at Oregon State University. However, I went to high school at Roseburg High School, which has the second best technical CAD drafting program in the nation, and is in the top ten for 3D animation. I also used to work for a commercial architect. During my spare time, I teach "Advanced 3D Animation and Drafting" at the high school...so even though I am not employed professionally, I have quite a bit of experience in the fields of techincal CAD drafting, 3D animation, and architectural CAD drafting.

Regardless, I still believe that there are better ways of spending money than on professional cards. If I were an employer, my most valuable assets are obviously my employees. Their skills would determine how successful my company would be. I'll give an example. Right now, I'm working heavily with Global Illumination for my animations...the increase in realism is incredible, but the render time explodes when I use it. Any sort of complex scene will tear my 2.53GHz P4 w/ 1GB of RDRAM to shreds...I need a lot more computing horsepower. What it boils down to is that the quality of my work is being limited by my computer, which most employers would consider unacceptable. Like I stated in my previous post, I could think of a dozen things I (as an employer) would rather spend my money on. I don't know what sort of professional is being limited by their graphics card (I'm sure there are some out there), but I would rather buy a bunch of rackmount computers for a renderfarm than spend $1000 per computer on a professional 3D graphics card.

Don't get the wrong idea here...I'm not trying to say these cards suck. It's just that in my first love (technical drafting), speed is EVERYTHING, and a graphics card would never be able to benefit me enough to be worth the cost, even if I was an employee. Practice and skill have soooo much more of an influence on what makes a good employee, that to me, $1000 is a rediculuous price to pay for the small speed increase a professional card gives. The day that I find myself being limited by my graphics card is the day that I evangelize their use for high-end CAD users...but I doubt that day will come. So until then, I'll say that 90% of CAD/3D animation users would benefit from some other upgrade than a professional 3D graphics card.

 

[Rand]

Originally posted by: Vespasian
Professional video cards these days are consumer video cards that have been modified to work more efficiently with certain graphics programs.

3Dlabs is the exception, but their Wildcat 4 performs very poorly compared to the new Fire GL cards from ATi.

Gaming perhaps, but I'd still take a WildCat 4 7210 over ATi's FireGL X1 any day when it comes to most Pro3D tasks
Choose any area you desire....wireframe, shaded, simple or complex tectured models with or without lighting. Line AA, sub-pixel rendering quality or anything else.... drivers? Well I tend to have a reputation for being VERY fond of FireGL's driver team but even I'd lean towards 3DLabs here if only for the fact that they consistently do more with less in terms of processor utilization and resource allocation efficiency.

I can even think of a number of arguments for the WildCat VP over the FireGL X1 in some respects.

Also, has ATi cleaned up the visual quality yet?
I remember seeing a review over at Ace's, that compared the FireGL 8800(I think it was), Quadro 750XGL and a Wildcat, though I think the Wildcat was a WC III, and the ATi card had some image quality issues here and there.
The nVidia card had some too for that matter, while the Kitty did fine all the way.

Spatial precision stinks on the R100/R200 core, and no driver remedies can do much for that. Small pixel rendering errors, and polygonal allignment issues are the norm. So in reference to the Mobile region for the FireGL 7XXX, and the desktop bound FireGL 8XXX/E1 no nothing has changed.
It's still well below the quality offered by the Quadro 4, and even further below that of the FireGL 2/3/4, and WildCat II/III/4/VP.
Then again such inefficiencies arent on a level that will impact much of the Pro 3D market. After all the Quadro 2 saw some success on the low end and it had similar problems.

The FireGL X1/Z1 have cured that for the most part, I wouldnt quite put it on level with the WildCat 4, and it's arguable even with the WildCat VP but it can hold it's own relative to the rest of the market.
Now if only ATi would show a little desire to resurrect a little of the magic that made the FireGL 2/4 so appealing.

 

[Mingon]

jbond04 - when you have worked on large models / assemblies that take an age to render just so you can check how it 'looks' then you would grab any pro card thats avaiable and gives you a boost. what you must remember is that a company will by the best at that time and will not upgrade in a couple of months. hence the best way to get the best performance is to go with the fastest of everything - be that video card, scsi drive or cpu.

back to the original question, by buying a pro card you get guaranteed driver support - and thats worth a lot. (time = money)

 

[Random Variable]

The FireGL X1/Z1 have cured that for the most part, I wouldnt quite put it on level with the WildCat 4, and it's arguable even with the WildCat VP but it can hold it's own relative to the rest of the market.

The Fire GL X1 soundly defeats the Wildcat 4 7110 on all six viewperf benchmarks.

http://www.specbench.org/gpc/opc.data/vp7/summary.html

And don't forget about the much improved internal color precision of the Radeon 9700/FGL 9700 VPU.

 

[dullard]

Professional grade cards are optimized for high polygon counts. They are meant to draw one complex picture fast and accurately. Consumer level cards are meant to draw many simple pictures as fast as possible. It is basically a completely different goal - thus different optimizations.

I work with 3D modeling, which requires a good video card to build the model and to display the final scientific calculations. I've compared consumer level cards to professional cards for this purpose (on roughly similar machines). For one model in particular, the consumer card would take 2-3 minutes to display the result I wanted. If I wanted to see the temperature in the core of the reactor - I need to wait 3 minutes. If I wanted to see the velocity, or pressure, etc it would take another 2-3 minutes. (And I had to display these at a hundred different time steps to make an animation). It was frustrating to do my research. Switching to the professional card, the same thing took 10-15 seconds. To me spending $600 on a professional card was well worth it. I could get tons more work done in a day. If $600 makes a $60,000 a year employee 10% more efficient, then you make your money back in just over a month. I routinely work on workstations that cost between $4000 and $30,000. Trust me spening $500 more on a video card is a drop in the bucket.

Here is a decent place to see benchmarks. I linked to just one of their reviews, but there are more if you want to browse the site. As you can see the top Wildcat card blew away the competition in CAD programs. I personally use Fire GL cards since the price/performace is the best of anything I've seen.

 

[db]

Another example is for NLE (video editing) when you need multiple monitors with overlay on *each*, not just one as is usually the case with consumer/gamer cards.

 

[Rand]

Originally posted by: Vespasian

The FireGL X1/Z1 have cured that for the most part, I wouldnt quite put it on level with the WildCat 4, and it's arguable even with the WildCat VP but it can hold it's own relative to the rest of the market.

The Fire GL X1 soundly defeats the Wildcat 4 7110 on all six viewperf benchmarks.

http://www.specbench.org/gpc/opc.data/vp7/summary.html

And don't forget about the much improved internal color precision of the Radeon 9700/FGL 9700 VPU.

With an entirely different platform and vendor I can't say as I consider those results to have much merit.

Originally posted by: db
Another example is for NLE (video editing) when you need multiple monitors with overlay on *each*, not just one as is usually the case with consumer/gamer cards.

You don't necessarily need a Pro3D card for that, Matrox and Appian both contribute heavily in said market and neither half even a glimmer of significantce in the Pro3D market space.