[geeks] geeks Digest, Vol 76, Issue 4

[nate at portents.com]

> On Mar 3, 2009, at 13:32 , nate at portents.com wrote:
>
>>> I don't see a real CAD or 3D rendering card being listed.
>>
>> Anyone know if Apple actually has a different OpenGL driver for the
>> Quadro
>> and FireGL stuff on Macs?  On the PC, this is all they are:
>>
>> NVIDIA Quadro - typically just a consumer GeForce chip, maybe add a 3D
>> stereo glasses port on the back, change the resistors so the PCIe ID
>> is
>> different, then bundle a different, optimized (for quality/precsion
>> rendering, not speed i.e. less corner-cutting) OpenGL driver for use
>> in
>> "CAD or 3D rendering", charge a lot more money.
>
> Are you sure about this?

Yes, the hardware differences typically aren't drastic.

> When I was helping a guy do some video editing, he used Quadro cards,
> and they were far faster than non-quadro cards with that task.  2D
> operations were very fast, but 3D not so much.

If the video editing was somehow using OpenGL, that would make sense.  If
it wasn't using OpenGL, his non-Quadro NVIDIA cards were probably
lower-end or older GPUs.

> I thought you were paying for pure memory speed on Quadro?

Memory speed gets a bit of a bump (typically on the order of a few %) and
capacity typically gets doubled (sometimes more) but bandwidth stays the
same, so you wouldn't notice a big difference unless you were running
something that was heavily performance constrained by the amount of video
memory.

Let's take a look at the top Quadro and non-Quadro cards - the Quadro FX
5800 and the GTX 285.  Quadro FX 5800 is a GT200b GPU with a 650Mhz core
clock, 1632Mhz RAM clock, 512-bit bandwidth and 4GB of VRAM.  GTX 285 is a
GT200b GPU with a 648Mhz core clock, 1476Mhz RAM clock, 512-bit bandwidth
and 1GB of VRAM in it's stock form (some third parties will clock their
cores and memory higher).

So mostly you're just paying for the right to use different OpenGL drivers
and the features they enable like higher-quality anti-aliasing modes in
pro apps with Quadro cards in SLI, not taking short cuts when rendering
scenes, certification with "Pro" apps, etc. (Part of me feels like this is
a borderline con game, but really, what can anyone do?)

- Nate