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thegt1
12-20-2009, 06:55 PM
Hi fellows i have a question for you. right now i'm just learning maya and this old comp that i have should hold me for the next 3 months.

Since i'm going to build a new machine for the next one, i have a newbie question, where in the pipeline is it that a workstation graphics card outperfoms the regular desktop card.

Is it in modelling, rigging, animation, rendering, like i said i will be using maya and later as i get better will be adding mudbox or zbrush, so please educate me on why the humongous difference in price from let's say the top of the line nvidia 295 and a fx 5600. Thanks in advance.
josh247
12-20-2009, 10:49 PM
Hey gt1.
I think that it should improve most real-time applications within 3D design as it is built to work with OpenGL (used in Maya) rather than DirectX. It also can better calculate physics information and instead of directly refreshing the whole screen like GeForce cards do it rather compartmentalize's the screen into separate segments that it can update individually to improve performance. Unfortunately ZBrush douse not currently utilize the GPU and therefore is more effected by your proccesor speed but I do not know about Mudbox.
InfernalDarkness
12-20-2009, 11:39 PM
Workstation-grade cards used to make a huge difference. But that was many years ago, and these days most Geforce and Radeon cards perform equal to or better than their Quadro/Fire GL counterparts. Especially with Maya and Mudbox (GPU-intensive apps), as opposed to Zbrush (CPU-intensive).

From a financial perspective, it makes no sense at all to get a Quadro.

Nvidia's last "paper" on the topic, from 2003:

Quadro vs. Geforce (http://lmgtfy.com/?q=quadro+vs.+geforce)

Now in this paper, you'll read about things like hardware overlays and clipping panels and other "features" of the Quadro. But this was six years ago. None of these features are missing in 2009, and my Geforce regularly outperforms my Quadro in every area.

Up to you how you want to spend your money, though!
thegt1
12-21-2009, 05:46 AM
Thx for the answer.
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