Affordable Workstation Graphics Card Shoot-Out 141
MojoKid writes "While workstation graphics cards are generally much more expensive than their gaming-class brethren, it's absolutely possible to build a budget-minded system with a workstation-class graphics card to match. Both NVIDIA and ATI have workstation-class cards that scale down below $500, a fraction of the price of most high-end workstation cards. This round-up looks at three affordable workstation cards, two new FireGL cards from AMD/ATI and a QuadroFX card from NVIDIA, and offers an evaluation of their relative performance in applications like Cinema 4D, 3D StudioMax, and SpecViewperf, as well as their respective price points."
Re:Workstation class?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Note that the term workstation usually means a high end system used for something a little more complex than web browsing and spreadsheets:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workstation [wikipedia.org]
I believe the progression, marketing-wise, goes:
Desktop -> Workstation -> Server
You're thinking of desktop hardware/software.
Re:Difference? (Score:5, Insightful)
Game cards are designed to render stuff as fast as possible, many times a second.
Workstation cards are designed to render everything in the desired quality, and take as long as it needs.
Superficial Market Creation (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's a shame they don't test them against 'game (Score:2, Insightful)
As in, do I stick to this GeForce and get that quadcore CPU in order to speed up my test renderings or does it make more sense to spend my money on a Quadro and stick to my slower CPU?
Re:Difference? (Score:5, Insightful)
We've got a home-grown application rendering a 4 million polygon model. Quadro 4500 is an order of magnitude faster than a 7800 GTX. You wouldn't guess that from the tech specs.
The 'pro' cards may not be meant for you (Score:2, Insightful)
However, you should be thinking of people using CATIA to build an entire car or even more exotic pieces of software for building entire airplanes. We're not talking the piddly few million of polies that the average Disney/Pixar movie ponders about in Maya/etc., even though those would benefit as well - we're talking a dew hundered million polies. Now we're talking 'pro'. Now we're talking the kind of people who used to buy SGI workstations at a couple $10k a piece, then switched to 'generic' workstations but fitted them with E&S (Evans & Sutherland) cards that were so big (similar in design to dual-GPU cards people are messing with now) they had to keep the casings off their machines or the things wouldn't even fit, and who are currently salivating at the nVidia QuadroPlex solutions in both desktop and rackmount form ( http://www.nvidia.com/page/quadroplex.html [nvidia.com] ) before crying as even they think that's just a might bit too pricy and go back to the suped-up PNY QuadroFX offerings ( http://www2.pny.com/category_buymulti.aspx?Category_ID=329 [pny.com] ).
Consumers, prosumers and small business need not apply. As you do say, it's not worth the extra money (and it -is- a good chunk of extra money) for those groups.