GeForce or Quatro?

georgemancer

First, I'm looking to understand why each card type is better for its intended purpose (gaming/cad.)

Based on equal cost value, to what degree is each card type better for its intended purpose?

I do some of both (gaming/cad) and have a powerful home system using GeForce. Now, I'll be buying a(far less powerful yet equally expensive:poly131:) laptop and I'm looking to be swayed in either direction for choice on card type.

Magic guru powers and/or links are appreciated.

Ryan Clark

I could be wrong, but my impression is that there is not much difference in the hardware. I believe the Quadro drivers are a bit more cautious, tuned for stability and image quality while Geforce drivers are tuned for game performance. Maybe someone has better information, though.

Panupat

I've read (on cgtalk I think) that quadro allows for much higher polygon on your screen. It's something they hardwire into the card and fooling your PC with forceware drivers won't help. Geforce will never be able to handle more than 4 million-8 million polygons? It will just be slow no matter your other hardware specs. Whereas Quadro will still work smoothly even at higher polygon counts than that assuming you have enough ram.

georgemancer

Oops, I meant Quadro. Bah, can't edit topic.

CheeseOnToast

My experience with some older quadro cards was that yes, they can handle more raw polygons but as soon as you introduce textures/per pixel shaders etc. the gaming card wins. This is based on equal price, btw.

Zbrush is reliant a lot more on CPU/memory than GPU, while Mudbox/Silo etc. make heavy use of the graphics card. Just something else to bear in mind.

Murdoc

I never really got that, I've used Quadros at work and they sucked. They can't play games well(and I remember at the time U3 didn't even support them, so they literally couldn't play it) and they were no more stable then my Geforce at home.

Never understood it and would never waste the money on one until someone pointed out a difference/advantage that I could see for myself.

thomasp

depends. for me, quadro makes a difference as one part of a quality machine. my home box - an intellistation with a quadro fx - is all round rock solid. max hardly ever crashes and i think i saw the last bluescreen in early 06 when i installed XP on it the first time. however, the whole machine is max-certified so it's a little hard to say how much of an influence the graphics card actually has.

one speed advantage it has is with wireframes, on a consumer card you can notice quite the performance drop when switching from shaded to wire on any half-complex model.

machines at work - custom-built with gamer cards and running very similar stuff, can be a bit flakey. there are some very reliable ways to crash the application that the quadro-equipped box seems immune to.
another reason to go for quadro might be apps that just don't work well with nvidia gamer cards, maya i think is a regular offender, refresh issues and the like, but no idea if this is still true. there are some other apps outside the CG realm as well.

but yeah, it's not magically faster, in some cases slower in fact - and if you want to play games on the computer, better choose something else.

MoP

If you're using Maya, and want to get a GeForce series card, be prepared for lots of viewport issues.
I've never had any problems with a "gamer" card with 3dsmax, although as thomasp says, turning wireframes on for a whole complex scene can slow it down quite a lot.
I've had a ton of Maya viewport issues on a 7800GTX, Autodesk recommend using one of the "workstation" cards with Maya, and I can see why.

Mark Dygert

At work I have a IBM workstation 3.6ghz 3gb ram and a quadro. I get a constant 5fps no matter how dense the scene, great for baking normal maps which I do about two days out of the year. But it never improves above that and I animate 10k characters with only a diffuse. Thats hardly pushing anything.

If I load the same character file at home 3.4ghz, 2gb ram, SLI-Geforce 7600gt x2, then I can get 1.5fps - 24fps depending on what else is running in the background. I can also bottom out the fps if I load a heavy scene. But I can view shaders in the viewport where as I can't really do that with the quadro, which is fine for work, no shaders required there.

We animate at 15fps and I pretty much get that at home. But being stuck at 5fps no matter what is pretty crappy. It makes previewing animation a bitch, "render/preview, wait for a shitty looking preview, view it, go back to make changes" instead of "click play, make changes"

At work we are going to test out a 8600gtx and see how it stacks up. I have a feeling we'll be switching over. The work we do just isn't getting close to the limits of the Geforce line.

MoP

Wow, those FPS rates sound really low Vig. Although I guess animation/skinning is what's slowing stuff down? I get 100+fps in Max with a 1-2million triangle scene with a few textures in, and about 30fps in Maya with the same.
As soon as I skin something vaguely complex in Max then it slows right down though... not sure why that is.

Mark Dygert

I should have been more clear. Those are fps are with animation playing in the viewport.

It's running morph targets, skin morphs, flex modifiers, cloth sims* and biped animation often a few layers deep. If I'm just viewing the model and working on it in the viewport then my numbers are more close to yours but it doesn't matter because for me its all about the play back speed since I switched gears to animation.


* just playing back the sim, not actually running it.

CheeseOnToast

About Maya display issues and Geforce : they all went away after going into the card's advanced options and switching "threaded optimization" from auto to off for Maya.

MoP

CheeseOnToast: Yep, I've tried that fix - it works on some machines, not on others... I guess it might be to do with since it's a program-specific setting, and you're running another app which has specific settings too (like a game in the background), then one cancels the other out and Maya goes back to its glitchy ways.
I've even had the perspective viewport sometimes appear in the timeline, or the UV Texture Editor window once or twice... very weird.

The "threaded optimization" fix worked for me on one machine, but then another one with nearly identical hardware, it only improved it - usually it was 5 minutes before going dodgy, now it's about 30 or so.

Could be driver versions doing different things too, I will have to research this to find if there is a consistent way of fixing it...

CheeseOnToast

Hmm, everyone at my work who has used the fix has had no further problems. We're all using pre 8000 series Geforces as well. Maybe we're not stressing it the same way as you Mop...what're you doing that's so special? ;P

Ryno

The "professional" cards tend to be oriented to pushing lots of polygons in OpenGL mode. Many of them won't run Direct X worth a damn. They'll struggle with DX shaders and lots of textures. Game cards kick ass for DX, and do OpenGL OK. Since we work in games, get a game card.