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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."
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?
I gave up sigs almost a year ago.
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.
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?
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.
...if you're planning on using a Linux workstation, don't buy an ATI card. I don't mean this as flamebait, just practical advice. Even with the new proprietary drivers or even the open source drivers, there are still many, many problems. Of course, I prefer ATI on Windows, so it all depends on what you want to do.
As soon as the shootout's over, they'll come gunning for us. I, for one, welcome our new graphical overlords.
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.
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.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Have a look at this site - it is possible to flash an 8800 GTX to Quadro FX 5600:
http://aquamac.proboards106.com/index.cgi?board=hack2&action=display&thread=1178562617
G4 Hackintosh
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.
CAPS LOCK IS THE CRUISE CONTROL OF AWESOMNESS
sorry, but a graphics card does not speed up your rendering unless your renderer can take advantage of the graphic card; hint: that's not very many, and those that do only do so for very limited tasks.
The only reason you should have for upgrading your graphics card within the 'consumer' market is if your viewport redraws are being sluggish; this will still allow you to play games properly* as well.
The only reason to upgrade to e.g. FireGL or a QuadroFX is if you're pushing really massive amounts of polys and want a dedicated support line; e.g. for 3ds Max, there's the MaxTreme drivers for the QuadroFX line - you don't get that for a consumer card.
* on the other hand, do *not* expect to play games with a QuadroFX properly. Do not expect frequent driver upgrades just to fix a glitch with some game. Do not expect the performance in games to be similar to, let alone better than, that of the consumer cards.
For 3D Artists dealing with rendering, the CPU should always be the primary concern (faster CPU / more cores = faster rendering**) followed by more RAM (more fits in a single render; consider a 64bit O/S and 3D Application), followed by a faster bus (tends to come with the CPU)/faster RAM, followed by a faster drive (if you -are- going to swap, or read in lots of data, or write out lots of data, you don't want to be doing that on a 4200RPM drive with little to no cache) followed by another machine to take over half the frames or half the image being rendered (** 'more cores' only scales up to a limited point. A second machine overtakes this limit in a snap), as long as you don't have something slow like a 10MBit network going (for data transfer).
And I daresay that he isn't the only one. The write-up is confusing, at best. Had me going for a bit, anyway. To ordinary people, even 'ordinary' slashdot-readers, a 'workstation' is some 'station' (a desk with a computer) that you do your 'work' on. That thing will usually contain a graphics controller that is on-board these days, the cost of which has been discounted in the price of the board, and certainly isn't expensive to an extent that a gaming-person's graphics controller will have a 'fraction' of the cost. Chagrin or no chagrin about lay (non-graphics) people reading topics that aren't meant for them, but to act as if this is logical, implicit or otherwise self-explanatory, is disingenuous and not much different from those slashdot-write-ups that start off describing some event in second life as if it happened in real life, and pretend that everybody knows what they're talking about. Clarity is king, and no man is an island and that sort of thing.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.