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Affordable Workstation Graphics Card Shoot-Out

Posted by kdawson on from the how-not-to-spend-four-digits dept.

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."

12 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. Difference? by AdeBaumann · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm sure I'm not the only one who doesn't know... so can anybody explain the difference between a high-end workstation card and a high-end gaming card?

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    I gave up sigs almost a year ago.
    1. Re:Difference? by prisoner-of-enigma · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "Workstation" generally means you're using some sort of 3D application, pushing hundreds of millions (or billions) of textured, lit triangles around. I have a 2S/2P Opteron workstation with 8GB of RAM and two Quadro FX 3500 cards, and I use it with 3DSMax.

      The difference in cards is subtle. Most gaming cards are tuned for ultimate speed (framerate) but perhaps not as much accuracy or quality. Workstation cards have things like hardware anti-aliasing of wireframes, a great feature when you're working with a huge model in wireframe mode. Textures are handled differently as well. Gaming cards tend to have smaller textures (again, for speed) than high-end rendering for movies or video. It's all in how the card is tuned. That's why gaming cards tend to perform lower at workstation tasks and high-end workstation cards tend to perform badly (or just plain hideous) at games.

      Note how an NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 (a card costing nearly $3,000) gets spanked by an 8800GT (costing a little over $200) in games. Some people buy workstation cards for gaming thinking they are faster than gaming cards. It's the old "it costs more so it should run faster!" argument. A fool and his money are soon parted.

      Anyway, there's one last dirty little secret in the workstation graphics card department: there is almost no hardware difference between a gaming card and a workstation card. In some cases there is no difference at all except the BIOS. There's a fellow called "Unwinder" over at www.guru3d.com who writes a program that will "softmod" a gaming card into a workstation card by strapping the BIOS. Benchmarks seem to show that a $200 gaming card softmodded into a $3,000 workstation card actually performs identically to the real $3,000 workstation card. This further bolsters the claim that NVIDIA and ATI are charging a ridiculous premium for their workstation cards.

      I softmodded some gaming cards to workstation cards a few years back. Worked like a charm. However, it got to be more trouble than it was worth because NVIDIA kept trying to break the softmods with driver updates. You'd have to wait for Unwinder to update his program for the new driver before it would work again. For my next rig I bought real Quadros, just not the $3,000 ones :-).

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      In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  2. It's a shame they don't test them against 'game ca by TheSunborn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's a shame they don't test them against 'game cards'. It would be really interesting to find out how theese cards differ from the normal gaming cards, when doing realtime 3d.

  3. Quadro FX5700 vs 8800 GTS OC? by alwaystheretrading · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'd really like to see a low end workstation card like one of these compared to a high end consumer card. When I'm working with half a million polys in 3DS Max 2008 is it really going to be worth the extra money to get the workstation card?

  4. Re:Workstation class?? by Broken+scope · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well i guess you really don't have a clue what they are referring to when they say "Workstation".

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    You mad
  5. Re:It's a shame they don't test them against 'game by TheSunborn · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ]In a rendering competition between the latest geforce and the latest quadro in maya or 3ds max or something, the quadro would completely obliterate the geforce I know that's how its suposed to be, but I have newer seen a benchmark between 'workstation cards' and 'gaming cards' which included example images from the different cards, that showed the difference.

    This benchmark don't even include any example images, which I don't understand because it might be the biggest difference between the cards. Having a benchmark of 'workstation cards' that are suposed to look better then the gaming cards, and then not even including anything about the image quality is wierd.

  6. The Biggest Scam of the Graphics Industry! by MindPrison · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The biggest curtain that have ever been pulled over the artists eyes is the "PRO"-Graphics card-Fad! Youre paying to feel "pro" - you dont get more "pro" for your money at all, you just get to "feel-like-pro" but very little extra to justify the real bucks youre spending on Quadro & FireGL series.

    I know this, Im a "graphics pro" myself that makes a living of designing 3D-Models & prototyping every day and Ive used nearly every card known to mankind.

    Heres my advice - take it or leave it:

    Buy a Gaming-Nvidia card! The difference between the Gaming Series cards and the Quadro series card is just some extra driver software that is optimized for your "insert-favorite-3D-app-here", yes...there are some less pixel-flaws..but this will never ever affect your final-render unless youre using Nvidias Gelato (which has - by the way - proven in many cases to render less effectively than modern Multi-core-CPUs with software rendering)

    You will save up to THOUSANDS of Dollars by not buying into the "PRO" hype, and youll be one happy puppy you didnt - and work just as efficiently (I know - we do) as the ones with the "PRO" cards, the game cards are actually using the same chipsets (remember the Quad-Mod you could perform on their cards, it aint fake you know!)...it would make absolutely NO SENSE for them business wise to produce 2 different cards when their cards can in fact do the same thing....and actually use the same chips.

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    What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
    1. Re:The Biggest Scam of the Graphics Industry! by prefect42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Problem is, your advice sounds reasonable even though it's not.

      Looking at the hardware spec sheets, I'd agree with you. But when it came to it, and I compared what at the time were the top cards (Quadro 4500 vs 7800GTX) the difference was night and day. If you wanted to play games, but the 7800GTX, it was waaaay faster. Want to do your own OpenGL apps that are quite demanding (high polygon count, multiple clipping planes, lots of transparency) and it's clear that not only is the 4500 faster, but it gives almost twice the bang for buck. That's pretty impressive for a 1500 ukp card, where you're not expecting value for money...

      What you need to see are benchmarks of a Quadro 1700 against a similarly priced 8800. I'd be tempted to call in favour of the Quadro for things that matter to me, but short of buying some to test, it's hard to get decent figures.

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      jh

    2. Re:The Biggest Scam of the Graphics Industry! by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Clipping planes are one of the features NVIDIA cripples in the gaming drivers (as games hardly use them); it has nothing to do with hardware. Buy a GeForce and flash it with the Quadro firmware if you really care about clipping planes, but honestly features like clipping planes, hardware overlays, etc are better implemented in your application and in your shaders anyway, where they will run equally fast on gaming and workstation cards.

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      main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
    3. Re:The Biggest Scam of the Graphics Industry! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You are exactly right. Many Geforce series cards can be made to function exactly the same as the Quadro series with RivaTuner and the NVStrap driver. I have actually done this myself on one of my cards.

      The only people who buy Quadros are non-saavy artist types. Those of us who know better can have the exact same thing for a fraction of the cost.

  7. Re:do we care? by TimFenn · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They're specifically in the market for 3D CAD, 3DS, Maya, that sort of stuff, of which there really isn't a heavy weight open source equivalent.

    I don't do 3D CAD, but being a biochemist type, I actually hang out with lots of folks that do work with all kinds of 3D data such as molecular models and volumetric MRI datasets. Workstation cards are especially useful for their stereo support, which many bio-folks find helpful when modelling. Most of the development is done on linux using stuff like VTK or VMD - its not just the engineering guys doing CAD in windows that want workstation cards.

    As a scientist that uses linux daily for 3D applications, I would like to see an open source workstation card for 3D graphics, dangit.

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    CAPS LOCK IS THE CRUISE CONTROL OF AWESOMNESS
  8. Free/Open Source workstation graphics card needed by SST-206 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What we need for our audio workstations is a fanless (silent) graphics card that will do OpenGL nicely, using Free/Libre/Open Source drivers. Affordable is helpful, but not essential.

    I've been watching the gradual progress of the Open Graphics Project (and now Open Hardware Foundation) with interest and hope they can release something good before the major manufacturers get a clue - quite likely considering their years of promises (ATI) and proprietary drivers (nVidia). It seems that Intel are doing good things, although IIUC those cards aren't so powerful; I know: power, silence, freedom (choose TWO only)... but progress? Is the ATI Radeon 8500 still the best fanless card with open drivers?

    Please wake me up when we get to the 21st Century. I'd happily read a whole page of adverts for news on such a product.

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    Co-operation beats competition