kromis there are no DX10 workstation cards from Nvidia or AMD yet...is there?
And yes quadros/firegl will rip a hole in gamer cards during certain "OpenGL" CAD programs.. The difference isn't always there for example 3dsmax now uses DirectX as its primary graphics core (one can still use opengl) and in this case Nvidia/AMD hasn't locked extensions like wire frame acceleration in directX yet so a gamer card running 3dsmax in directX will be just as fast. But in programs like Unigraphics, Solidedge,Rhino3D (some that i use) there is a nice difference that i can tell. People also say the boards are made better and from seeing a some real quadro's in person i say one can not tell, but who knows.
The main difference between quadro/firegl and geforce/radeon is purely driver setting turn on/off between the cards, nothing more. But these setting are worth money as you can tell quadro cards are 2-5x the price for the same gpu gamer card. This was proven but the program rivatuner for geforce 1-6xxx series. 7 series and above have certain check and balances from the GPU to the PCB board and driver to make sure one can change their gamer card to a workstation card like in the past. As far as i know how one still can turn even the newest radeon into a firegl with some custom settings and rivatuner. But this only works for windows 2k/XP 32-bit.
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