I have searched a bit on the subject. I keep seeing that Geforce cards perform as good or better than the Quadros. If this IS the case then gimme the what where and how. I had a Quadro FX4500 at my last job (sad to see it go) I now have the Geforce 7950 GX2. I could immediately see a difference in performance. It seemed like the Geforce, even though it had twice the RAM was slower or more flakey. I have since built a home puter as follows:
SHUTTLE SN27P2 MEM 1Gx2 CRUCIAL CPU AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ AM2 VGA GIGABYTE GEFORCE 7950GX2 x64 WINBLOWS
The thing screems. but the video just isn't there in SWX. I'm seeing the same if not more flakey things. The FMT doesnt always display, lots of residue, of course the wiping, etc.
Is 256mb of Quadro better than 1gb of Geforce? Is there a soft hack for the geforce? If so, does it even work or help? Is there any tweaks that can be done to the Geforce to make it perform better? Finally, WHY THE &^%#^% ARE QUADROS SO MUCH MORE????
Any tips or just experiences would be awsome! How many have tried Geforce and went back to Quadros?
the reason quadros are so much more expensive is that you are paying for the extra manpower that went into the card to make it very robust and reliable. a quadro card is a workstation card that is usually purchased by corporations that can get a return on that investment in, usually, a short time. the company producing the workstation card runs the card through so much more. if a gamer card has flakiness, it is no big deal - most gamers are not going to lose money when their machine is down.
The GF7950GX2 does have twice the RAM but it doesn't have twice the memory of the FX4500. Of course the 7950GX2 has 1GB but this RAM is divided by the two GPUs so in fact you end up with 512MB overall.
Another thing is that the 7950GX2 is basically two 7900GT glued together. A Quadro FX4500 is basically a Geforce 7800GTX 512MB (it's a bit slower than even a Geforce 7800GTX 256MB, though) which is noticeably faster than a 7900GT. So if your application doesn't make use fo SLI (which usually are games only) the 7950GX2 will be slower...
Besides that, the 7950GX2 doesn't work correctly in all mainboards. There is a list somewhere on the Nvidia site which lists compatible mainboards and BIOS revisions. With other boards this card has serious compatibility issues..
Sounds either like a driver issue or a compatibility issue to me. I don't think the Shuttle SN27P2 supports the 7950GX2...
No. First, video memory is one of the least important things. Lots of people think that 512MB gfx cards are better than 256MB gfx cards which simply is BS. What decides performance is not the amount of video RAM but primarily the type of GPU. A Geforce FX5200 with 256MB RAM is much slower than say a Geforce FX5700 with 128MB RAM. Same is valid for all other gfx cards.
As to Quadro better than Geforce: the Quadros have a few additional features like AA lines which the Geforce doesn't have. Technically, Quadro and Geforce are identical. They even use the exactly same drivers. If you don't need the Quadro features then a good(!) Geforce should be more than enough...
SW works fine on Geforce cards, as do most other CAD applications...
There was something called "SoftQuadro"...
In your case probably not...
Yes, probably by putting it in a board that supports the 7950GX2. Alternatively you can get a good(!) Geforce card like a PNY 7800GTX...
Because there is only one vendor (PNY) who makes them, and because these cards get certified by a lot of software vendors...
I recently went away from a Quadro FX4500 to a single Geforce 7800GTX
256MB which performs better in most applications and games. I had a SLI system with two Quadro FX4500 before, but the performance benefit was nonexistent in most applications...
Nope. Quadro cards are not more reliable than Geforce cards. The build quality of a PNY Quadro and a PNY Geforce is equally high (of course there are dozens of crap Geforce cards around, too). If a Quadro fails you also have to send it in and wait for a replacement if you don't bought it with a workstation from Dell or HP with NBD onsite service.
The only reason Quadros are more expensive is the certification process and that the market allows for such price levels...
There's an additional dimension here that nobody has mentioned. With a GeForce if you open more than 4 SolidWorks windows (4 documents) at a time you usually see a drastic slowdown, and the slowdown may not correct itself when the windows are closed. In fact it probably won't. You'll probably have to close SolidWorks (if you CAN close it without crashing) and you may even find that it's better to reboot. This is from painful experience. I remember there is some terminology that explains the difference -- buffers that are enabled with the Quadro and not enabled in the GeForce, or something similar. The difference MIGHT be bypassed with the SoftQuadro driver hack, given the same processor with the difference being on the card, but I haven't kept up with the development of the hack and whether or not the hardware now has the hack locked out. Recent cards probably can't be hacked, but I don't know that for certain.
yes true nvidia are closing the soft mod by changing their innards. no 7 series is modable. only some 6800 are modable. The mod enables z buffer use like fx4000.
yes true nvidia are closing the soft mod by changing their innards. no 7 series is modable. only some 6800 are modable. The mod enables z buffer use like fx4000.
Did you ever _read_ the posting of the OP? Probably not. Otherwise you probably would have noticed that he asked a hardware question (difference between Quadro and Geforce) which I answered. Of course I don't expect that you understand anything about this, especially since you already showed that your technical understanding is very limited at best (which wouldn't be a problem if you would just stop attacking people that know it better than you).
Well, America definitely has some experience in thinking they can rule the world while at the same time the brain and even the most common senses are absent. But this is definitely not the place for discussing it...
There is a fundamental difference between the two. In the past a GeForce and Quadro were actually identical chips and yet different by jumpering. And the difference is this. One is optimized to display huge numbers of triangles and the other is optimized to display very high frame rates with texture mapping. Gaming cards must display high frames with texture mapping. This way, with the textures, the software can fool the eye into thinking the object on the screen is far more detailed than it really is (hair, fabric, brick, etc.) with relatively few triangulations. The triangulations are what must be calculated for each frame so having fewer of these makes for fast recalculation. And since games move fast a dropped triangulation here or there will generally go unnoticed. CAD on the other hand is highly detailed and needs many more triangulations. Look at an STL preview with fine settings versus coarse settings. The memory on a graphics card goes primarily toward texture mapping. So a Quadro doesn't need all the memory a gaming card does to achieve it's results.It needs to be able to calculate huge numbers of triangles for detail that on a gaming card would be handled by texture mapping.
For example, consider shootem up games. In a shootem up game the buttons and levers on the sides of the weapon would just be a texture mapping. In a SW model they would be actual 3D features requiring lots of triangles to represent smoothly.
Right. But at least western Europe doesn't call itself "gods own country" and also doesn't invade other countries just for oil. But as I said this is not the place to discuss this...
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