Quiadro FX 500 or GF 5900?

[MaDSheeP]

alrighty, I am going to copy and paste this response, since everyone needs to know what these cards do...

The gaming card line of the GeForce cards (GeForce4, FX 5900 ETC), are cards that are optimized for 'Fill Rate'. These cards do it very well, and incredibly fast. Fill Rate is when a card takes an insanely high resolution image map and puts it on a wall, or a medium detail character. They can toss around these uber texture maps at a fast 60-90 frames per second.

Now what they can't do is toss around 2 million polygons, hell, a quarter of a million and you would definitely notice a performance hit.

And this is where the Quadro cards come in.

The quadro cards can toss around a million polygons with ease, you can do viewport effects such as smoke, or spark effects, and if I am correct, your 3d app will take advantage of the Quadro's capabilities to reproduce these effects, it can do that because the Quadro cards are so tightly integrated into the 3d apps...

And I haven't even gotten to one of the more important factors, stability!

When working in a 3d app that you paid a hell of a lot of money for, they will tell you to go fly a kite if you tell them your gaming card is causing your viewports to have weird artifacts in them...

The Quadro cards have tested and certified drivers, not buggy drivers pushed out the door because on nvidia's 'test' systems, they got a 15% boost in some performance test.

Please don't believe people when they say 'these cards are made from the same thing as the gaming cards'... because they kind of are, and they aren't. They used to be the same exact cards, but now nvidia has gotten wise to the Softquadro method, so they have actually started physically taking parts off the cards that do lighting effects when enabled by softquadro... basically they have taken it a step further and have started removing actual components from the gaming cards.

The SoftQuadro method of converting a gaming card is something that I personally don't have much experience with, but it sounded like you get a slight boost in speed, and a big boost in stability, but from what I hear.. it is no Quadro card.

And that is my $.02

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.