Regular and Professional Graphic card
Hello People,
I did research online but I couldn't find too much info about my question. My question is what is the difference between regular game graphic card (ex. 9800GT) and professional one (Quadro) for "RENDERING models/scenes?" Is it faster or something else?
Thank you very much.
I did research online but I couldn't find too much info about my question. My question is what is the difference between regular game graphic card (ex. 9800GT) and professional one (Quadro) for "RENDERING models/scenes?" Is it faster or something else?
Thank you very much.
Replies
Judging by a few "modding articles" i read some time ago you could make easily turn your gaming card into a workstation card by very easy modification. This leads me to believe that these cards are essentially the same hardware, but with different configurations. Oh yeah, and they want a hell of a lot more money for the workstation cards.
This is just my thoughts regarding this, based on several vague facts.
Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe thats too much of a generalisation lol.
I'd like to know this as well.
I mean I know for a fact that Game cards have better realtime performance than a Workstation card when playing games. So with this in mind, what differs a 3D packages Viewport (realtime) to make your belief true? Maybe driver optimization towards specific applications?
Workstation/Professional Cards aret optimized for certain professional packages such as Photoshop, Video Editing Apps, CAD programs, and Open GL support for 3d packages. Most technically support Direct X. But they are not optimized for gaming, and consequently are usually not optimized for creating game art.
I can tell you one thing... there is a price difference.
YES, there's some bits of hardware that you're missing out on with just a gaming card... but for the most part, it's all about the software.
http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=539
I recently bought a gtx 260 216 and i'm disappointed with its perfomance in 3dsmax. The difference working with quadro or Gforce is huge, and depends of the program. With modo, as example, you can work as fast as with a top quadro card with a 8400GS. Tested!
In europe, prices for quadro cards are very affordable, you can find a quadro 1700 for less than 400 euro, and a better quadro like the 3700 (=nvidia series 8xxx) for less than 700 euro. If you are going to work with programs such as Max, and not to play, for the same price as a gtx280 you can have an entry level quadro, enough good to work well.
Also I believe than Max+Quadro must be faster than Maya+FireGL. (since Max is faster than Maya, and Nvidia generally more reliable than ATI for realtime). But this is just a guess.
Ryno is right. The "Pro" part of the name might not be relevant at all to professional game artists.
yeah it seems to me a game artist might be better with a pro gaming graphics card, I guess it makes sense when you look at it that way.
We do a lot of rendering here and for the most part we get it done on our own systems. I think that's the reason they went with quadro cards, but I'm not sure. As we've been upgrading we've been putting gaming cards in the systems the quadro cards just couldn't play games or keep up with viewport speeds which was pretty important to our animation team and the quadro's just couldn't keep up. We've saved a bunch of time when we switched over, by being able to play the animations in the viewport instead of running out previews. We went from 2-5fps to 15-24fps (keep in mind we have morphs & skin morphs running, and pretty heavy scenes)
Not to mention that the quadro cards are almost 2-4x more expensive...
Autodesk released some custom quadro drivers and sped things up in the viewport 5-7fps but it didn't help with running games obviously so it was a no brainer for us. Cheaper and more functionality, sold.
But if your duties are to dial in shaders, test stuff in engine, or do any type of large scale environmental/level work where you need to see lots of textures in viewport, a higher end gaming card is the only thing that will work for you.
Incidentally, in one of my first 3d jobs in the late 90's, my boss bot a hot as shit professional Wildcat 3d card for around $4000. He was pissed as hell when he found out that it couldn't even play Half-Life.
I have a 9800GTX myself. It does everything I need and I can import meshes with millions of polys from zbrush into max with no problem...(although that might have more to do with x64 & 8GB ram I've got)
But since upgrading from a 7800 I get no red wire errors anymore on high res meshes in viewport.
I've seen that! what does the red wire error mean?/what causes it?
Even when viewing in smooth + highlight mode, a mesh will turn to a red wireframe and crash soon after if the video card and ram amount is not capable.
I will often times put a camera zoomed in on a piece of mesh so the scene isn't loading the entire thing at one shot upon file bootup. Then switch to perspective from that camera and crawl (pan) things slowly into view.
Having a nice video card, x64 version installed, and lots of ram won't make this such a problem but if you can't afford this kind of upgrade, the above camera trick will get things into view slowly. You really don't need everything in full view to render your normal maps and AO anyway. Just thought I'd mention the workaround I used to deal with.
basically if its for home use then the 3d you should be doing will never really justify or be advanced by one of these cards
1: Workstation cards have open ended code that will allow you to change the way the card will handle information. Along with a programmer you can get the card to do just about anything that you want it to. So if you don't know how to / don't want to program for the card you are not going to be able to squeeze out as much performance as you could.
2: As someone in here already said the workstation cards work really really good in open GL but not so great in Direct X. AFAIK this is because these cards are target towards Architecture or Engineering firms that need to make models that are as close to real as possible. I have heard that sometimes the models they make have to be accurate with in MM of the real thing. So to get this accuracy they are going to need to be able to pump a lot of triangles to the screen.
3: Generally the workstation cards are exactly the same hardware wise as their gaming counter parts however its a lot harder to make your gaming card do what you want it to do code wise as it does not come with open ended architecture like the workstation cards.
4: The updates for workstation cards are almost no existent unlike their gaming card counterparts which have new drivers every other month or so. This makes it a head ache when something does not work as you either have to wait for new drives to come out or get under the hood and mod your workstation card and the software to work with one another.
These cards are great cards and will get the job done but again you have to look at what you want to card to do for you. If you want millions of triangles on the screen at once or need extreme precision then this is the card for you.
If you want to be able to see shaders and do really complex shader work you will be better off getting a gaming card as it will allow you to push Direct X to its limits. Also with the money that you will save by getting a gaming card you could probably get a second card and SLI / Cross Fire them and have over a gig of video memory or more.