Video Cards

[Bathyscaph]

I think the intention of Quadro is to give you a better experience in max no matter the API. What that means without the performance driver in max I don't know. I use maya and a few other tools as well although max remains my 3d app of choice.

I know with Quadro I'll get perfect wireframes with complex meshes and since I want to make heavy use of polygons using tools like GrowFX I stick with Quadro. Wireframes are one of the areas that is very different from what a game card is optimized for. Speed is an issue with wireframes and accuracy as well. The other issue is that the scene graph in a 3d app can make a big difference for performance, so the raw power of a graphics card is gonna matter but so are those app-specific optimizations.

I think it's partly a matter of taste. If I was going to play games on my workstation and wanted a system for both work and play I'd probably go with a high-end gaming card. Also, if you churn through systems quickly, a gaming card makes more sense because you can get cheap raw performance and update more often.

Personally, I hate updating machines (with a dozen node-locked applications to move) so I try to go for the best, most-stable setup I can afford and leave it intact for awhile.

Anyway, I hope that helps. I don't work on the technical side, so this is just my take on things from an artist's perspective.

[mike_kennedy]

If Maxstreme is being discontinued ther eis even less reason to use a Quadro for Max.
At my old place I had a Quadro 4600 SLI setup and my Gaming card kept up with it even when it ran Maxstreme. Wireframes were nicer but not 5X the price nicer...

[Donald2B]

I'll throw in my 10 cents worth. MAXtreme is a live and well. It now comes bundled with the Quadro video card driver. When you run Max for the first time it will detect that there is a performance driver and ask if you want to install it. The last couple of MAXtreme versions have been based on DirectX and NOT OpenGL like in the past. I have been doing some testing with a GeForce GTX280 vs. Quadro FX4500. There is definitely a hardware generation difference between them, but in many cases the Quadro still performs the best under all situations. Especially if there are lots of VRay Proxies (don't know why, but it does). I was always under the same impression that there was never a good reason for buying a Quadro until I started doing more testing and running into little snags here or there with the game cards. Right now, I am no longer recommending any game card for our production environment due to some of these problems. I do use a GTX295 @ home and love it, but that computer is used more for general purpose and some random zombie killing. The Quadro FX4500 and GTX280 are both at work and I have been swapping them in and out of the same Dual Quad Core Xeon (XPx64 & Vista x64) for all testing purposes. Cheers!