Graphics Cards... Help!

Andr

Hello dear Polycount community!

I was hoping someone could clear my conscience about the following matter:

I've been considering getting new GPU for quite a while now, I am sitting on my beloved Nvidia GTX 480 unit which has served me very well as of now (it still rocks!)

However, when it comes to simulation with particles and other similar matters I have been informed that the Quadro series cards are engineered to tackle those tasks better (Rendering/Real-time simulation etc.)

I've been scouting the net to find good reviews to compare a more 'commercial' card such as the GTX 580 to a Quadro card, but I seem to come to a pretty empty-handed state when doing so.

So I was wondering if anybody knows which factors play the biggest role in the margin between the 'game' oriented cards and the more 'processing'-directed Quadro cards. I usually look at the numbers to compare cards with each other, but there seem to be a few more factors at play with the darn Quadro cards.

Thanks in advance!

- Andr

walreu

Could you tell more about what kind of work you are doing? Software you are using etc..

Andr

Sure, I'm working a lot with dynamics (particles and voxels) during my spare time. I work a lot with Vray RT / Mental Ray as well together with 3ds max, so I do a lot of rendering work. I render at pretty high resolutions too so I wonder how a Quadro card could improve my rendering times in terms of simulation and just general render-times .

As I understand it the architecture of the Quadro cards are completely different to other cards.

m4dcow

The architecture is identical at this point. Drivers, Quality Control and Support is what is different with Quadro cards.


My suggestion would be to research what cards work well with the software you use and make a decision based on that.


I would mention that Compute performance of a GTX 580 is a bit higher than the GTX 680 so if you go consumer for certain things newer might not be better.

PaulP

I had to make this decision a while ago when I built my new PC. What it really comes down to is if you're PC is going to be a dedicated work system, then go quadro. If you want to do some gaming as well, get a high performance GTX. If you want a quadro, and want to game, you'll need to invest a fair bit of money into your card.

EDIT: also, its worth checking out tomshardware.com, they usually have indepth bench tests for graphics cards. Here's one compaing quadro vs fireGl