Comparing Quadro to Geforce video cards

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

You can have even 100" LCD all that matters is the resolution so what is it ?

[windrockwater]

Its a Dell U3011 2560x1600. Lots of real estate!

[windrockwater]

Alright so I finally got back to working on some 3d work with my new Quadro 5000 card. All i can say so far is "HOORAY". For me and my workflow, its a big jump up in viewport performance (my biggest need). I upgraded from a GTX 580 and I am having much better performance with less viewport lag. Just my 2 cents since i have agonized for years about whether to cough up the dough for the overpriced Quadro. Glad I did....

[Pixelcon]

I just purchased a gtx670 instead of a quadro 2000. I'm looking forward to doing some testing in the near future. I have a quadro 2000 at work so I should be able to get some accurate side-by-side comparisons.

[alexyork]

I still can't justify the price. It seems that the only real advantage of Quadro over GeForce is the amount of VRAM enabling you to render some larger scenes using GPU-enhancement in RT/Iray etc. And now we can get 4GB GeForce cards and I'm sure it won't be long before 6GB cards are around (on a single GPU of course), or when GPU-enhanced renderers are able to take into account VRAM across two GPUs on a single board as a whole. Soon enough 8/12GB Quadros will arrive then 6GB GeForce will be standard, and we'll be more practically able to render heavy scenes with GPU-enhancement.

The whole viewport performance thing... I work with seriously heavy architectural scenes often with hundreds or even thousands of proxies etc and my 560 (yeh a 560!) handles it just fine when using Adaptive Degredation. It would be nice to be able to not use AD and have maybe 20fps instead of 10fps, but for several THOUSAND extra pounds it's just a no-go for me. I'd rather spend that money on new rendernodes or another 30" screen, or a couple of good holidays!

Unless they release a medium-level card with 6GB vram for < £1000. Then I might look into it.

[windrockwater]

I tried sooooo many different ways of getting acceptable viewport performance over the last few years. But i use alot of landscape plants. Working on buildings was always a piece of cake. But then as soon as i started placing lots of high poly trees around, things became unusable. I got very good at Xrefs, Proxies, Display as Box, Layers, etc. But still it was painful. Now i can work on many of the plants and still have good viewport performance.

Maybe I have been doing something wrong this whole time. But (for now) i am getting a much better experience with the Quadro. I just did this render and had almost no viewport lag. It would have sucked on my GTX580 on my same workstation. So maybe there is truth to the Quadro being better? Flame on!

[Franx]

Dont know what you consider acceptable viewport performance, but the 560ti I have at work gives me around 15-25 fps on the 5 million polys scene I'm working on right now, with AD enable and realistic mode (plus another Max instance running, along with Autocad, Photoshop, Outlook, Excel and a couple of Explorer windows). I guess the 580gtx 3gb I have at home would be slightly faster. For me, anything higher than 5-10 fps is totally workable.

[windrockwater]

Maybe it is becuase i am using a 30" monitor, but I just could not get that same performance using my GTX580 card. I tried alot of different settings but would get less than 1 FPS when my polys went anyway near that high.

[trixian]

I'd like to chime in here.
I too have a Gtx580 at home on an i7 2600k box with 8 gigs of ram. At work I have a Customized HP Z600 workstation with 2x6 core xeon E5645 cpu, 24 gigs of ram, and over time, a few different quadro gpus. Started with fx 2000, and lately got a Quadro 5000 (the PSU doesn't allow me any better Quadro cards).
Consistently my personal machine at home outperforms my work machine completely. So much in fact that I'm thinking there is something really wrong with the setup here at work. But as far as I can see, everything is fine.
I have been in this business since 1996, and only back in the early days with the first generations of hardware accelerated graphics cards, did the "pro" cards perform better.
I cannot understand what is going on when I read about peoples experiencing performance boosts with Quadros. Have I just happened to have really good rigs with gamer cards, and at the same time really bad rigs with Quadros every time I changed machines since 1996?
My former workstation at work came with a FX 4500, and replacing that with a gtx 480 gave me a massive improvement (on the same rig).
The only reason I'm currently not using a gamer card is my current box's lack of power connectors, and non standard PSU. (Thanks IT department )
I can see the reason to use a Quadro with 6 gigs of vram for gpu rendering and cuda stuff, but not for just working in max.

One thing though, is that max and its plugins are really inconsistent about viewport performance. Certain objects slow things down for no apparent reason, and certain plugins sometimes completely screw things up with their "latest updates", like Vrayscatter at some point did.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Well I guess its Nvidia way of making a lot of money on market where people dont really know what they need - bad IT departments... Its only now and few years back that Nvidia has started working on quatros back again because people realized(finally) that GTX>Quatro.


Also a side note. I hear that new IRay release is making GTX 680 around 30% faster in render times than GTX580 so we need Vray GPU update to get render speed boost on kepler GPUS !!!