Affordable Workstation Graphics Card Shoot-Out

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."

Comments

Re:Workstation class??

[merreborn]

applications like Cinema 4D, 3D StudioMax, and SpecViewperf

You may not use those applications on your "workstation", but there are thousands of professionals who do

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

I believe the progression, marketing-wise, goes:
Desktop -> Workstation -> Server

You're thinking of desktop hardware/software.

Re:Difference?

[Broken scope]

I think it works like this.

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

[ludomancer]

There was a time when you could purchase a 3D card that worked excellently for both work and play. These new "workstation" cards are a farce. They are an ostensible attempt at a solution where there is no problem. I am a professional 3D Artist and I can attest to this due to personal experience over the last 15 years. Don't buy into this crap. They DO perform better for workstations, but only due to the fact that gaming cards are intentionally crippled in this area in order to push this alternative product. Luckily most gaming cards currently on the market work well enough for 3D workstations, so I encourage everyone to ignore this attempt at desultory market generation as much as possible, because it's perfectly possible for you to get great performance out of a gaming card for both purposes.

Re:Difference?

[prefect42]

I'd say it's more complicated than that. Gamer cards push game graphics around fast. This often means high memory bandwidth for texturing, fast full screen anti-aliasing, and these days fast shader performance. Workstation cards often are better at line-antialiasing, much better with high polygon count work, much better working with mutiple windows. Quadros always used to support more clipping planes in hardware for example. How much of this is a real hardware difference, who knows.

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.