game vs pro graphics cards

[Apoclypse]

usually the cards are the same, except the dcc cards have much better support for opengl (especially with the ati cards). There are some soft mods you can do to get your game card to think its a dcc card. But if you are serious about 3d you should go pro.

[opentarget]

thanks for the reply, can pro cards play games well? all work and no play....and all that!

[PyroNeko]

Just a random couple of things to throw out there, nVidia and ATI are not the only companies that make video cards. There are some interesting cards out there aimed at hardware rendering. Personally though I would go with a mainstream nVidia card mainly because of Gelato (http://www.nvidia.com/page/gelato.html) , it seems like a very interesting renderer and allthough i doubt it has anywhere near the quality of mental ray i think it would be great to mess with. It also runs on regular GeForce cards so you could still play games.
(http://www.nvidia.com/page/gelato.html)

[lots]

At the hardware level, gamer cards and pro cards (at least in the case of Nvidia) are practically identical. The largest difference you will see is in the drivers. Quadros generally have drivers that have optimizations for 3D and CAD based apps. while Geforces generally have drivers optimized for games (Direct3D). In all other respects, you can consider the two almost identical.

This is why tricks like soft modding a Geforce to pretend its a quadro work. Granted more recent Geforce cards have had alterations to thier protection, and in combination with the lack of updates to the soft modding tools, means that new Geforces are not moddable to Quadro status.

Having said that, a Geforce running its stock drivers will not perform as well as a Quadro running its stock drivers in a 3D app that supports it. Things like games, the Geforce will tend to be better at because its drivers are better for games. Though you can still play games on a Quadro, and use 3D apps on a Geforce, just realize you are not getting the optimum performance out of your hardware for that particular application.

I would say, if 3D is a hobby, go for the Geforce. If you make money off your work, and need it for a living, get a Quadro. And of course check to make sure your 3D app supports quadros in the first place! Lightwave for example, does not take advantage of any of the features found in the Quadro's drivers. Maya and 3DSMax do.

[Arcon]

I would say, if 3D is a hobby, go for the Geforce. If you make money off your work, and need it for a living, get a Quadro.


for the amount of money i could spend on one quadro based off the 7800GTX i could buy the fastest dual-core render-node around, which would be way better for my company as far as making money goes ;) i work in a viz studio and we all use GeForce cards, i work on scenes with hundreds of thousands of polys but maybe that's considered small these days....?

do quadros support more textures or lights in hardware or something...? i don't do that kinda stuff at extreme levels so wouldn't have noticed any difference.... in any case at 5 x the price i still think there's some major price gauging there.

[micster]

I bought a PNY Nvidia GeForce 6800 GT when it first came out for $389 and it played everything! Were talking Battlefield 2 with everything cranked up to high with no lag or dropped frames. Whenever I used Maya I would sometimes lose parts of the GUI or my image planes and other weirdness. Inside Adobe After Effects I could never scrub the timeline, if I did the program would crash with a fatal error caused by the videocard.

Most of those things I could live with because I played Battlefield quite a bit more offten than I animated within After Effects. Unfortunately, after playing any game for over 10 mins. would cause the temp to soar into the hundreds of degrees causing my system to crash. It turned out to be a deffective card and was replaced for free by PNY. I didn't know that at the time so I used the opportunity to justify buying a PNY Quadro that retailed for just under $2000 (I got it for $500). Two things happened:

All of my problems with Maya and Adobe products went away
I can barely play Battlefield 2 at all
You would think that a $2000 videocard could manage to play a little FPS, but I have to crank all the settings down to their lowest setting and I still get extremely choppy gameplay. As "lots" pointed out this is a driver issue and could probably be fixed if I used some 3rd party drivers, but that seems a little tedious.

[thomaspecht]

micster, have you tried choosing another profile in the quadro driver settings? maybe even creating your own? i never do play games on my rig (quadro 4000 here) so i can't say for sure but i imagine it's probably some setting that eats your game performace.

for example, i just flipped through my standard (3ds max) profile and saw that certain sync and buffer options are ticked on that are known to reduce game performance. also, just discovered: enhanced CPU instruction set is ticked off here - oopsie.

[RiKToR]

I bought a PNY Nvidia GeForce 6800 GT when it first came out for $389 and it played everything! Were talking Battlefield 2 with everything cranked up to high with no lag or dropped frames. Whenever I used Maya I would sometimes lose parts of the GUI or my image planes and other weirdness. Inside Adobe After Effects I could never scrub the timeline, if I did the program would crash with a fatal error caused by the videocard.

Most of those things I could live with because I played Battlefield quite a bit more offten than I animated within After Effects. Unfortunately, after playing any game for over 10 mins. would cause the temp to soar into the hundreds of degrees causing my system to crash. It turned out to be a deffective card and was replaced for free by PNY. I didn't know that at the time so I used the opportunity to justify buying a PNY Quadro that retailed for just under $2000 (I got it for $500). Two things happened:

All of my problems with Maya and Adobe products went away
I can barely play Battlefield 2 at all
You would think that a $2000 videocard could manage to play a little FPS, but I have to crank all the settings down to their lowest setting and I still get extremely choppy gameplay. As "lots" pointed out this is a driver issue and could probably be fixed if I used some 3rd party drivers, but that seems a little tedious.

What Quadro did you get? I can play BF2 on mine on high with a wierd glitch on the shadows, only. I have a 6800 Ultra Extreme AGP 256 from eVGA that is softmodded to a Quadro FX 4000. I have seen a real mobile Quadro of the 6xxx series GPU play BF2 with no glitches with high settings as well.

To the original poster... your questions have been answered by those greater than I but I will give my info, a pro card will handle gaming fairly well with a marginal decrease, about 10%, of performance in games, but that is countered to double the performance in OpenGL so its really a choice thing. As I have said I have a AGP 6800, and I can turn it to Quadro from GeForce with 2 reboots, but I tend to leave it on GeForce until I start doing some serious work in Maya or Combustion. The OpenGL improvements are extremely noticable.

The real question you have to ask is this, are you a gamer or a digital content creator? Then after, do I have the money for a good quadro?, because if you get an older generation of quadro in lieu of a newer GeForce then you may be better with the GeForce. For example the Quadro 4000 (based of 6xxx GPU) though nice, is probably more on equal footing with a cheaper GeForce 7950 GPU, so you may want to consider that as well.

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