NVIDIA GeForce To Quadro Software Mod

babyshiori writes "The NVIDIA Quadro family of professional graphics cards are very, very expensive. But many people know that Quadro and GeForce graphics cards are virtually identical in hardware. Obviously, you cannot just use Quadro drivers with your GeForce graphics cards. However, there is an easy way to soft-mod an NVIDIA GeForce desktop graphics card into an NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics card. Tech ARP shows us just how to do it. 'It all revolves around the driver support for professional 3D applications like 3ds Max or Maya. Quadro drivers allow the Quadro to be used to accelerate the rendering operations of such professional 3D applications while GeForce drivers do not. This is the basis for the premium prices NVIDIA (and ATI) charge for their professional-grade graphics cards.'"

Comments

Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[pipingguy]

I work in an engineering field where we use Quadro cards for visualization of largish process plants in an AutoCAD 3D environment.

This type of work is not as intensive as 3D animation.

Over the years I've seen not much difference between "professional" and "consumer" video cards even though the cost between the two can be $600 or more.

Even with relatively lame, $200 cards the walkthrus are pretty responsive when using the proper viewing software (the "walkthrus" are typically specially created for responsiveness so we can zoom to detail we need to see).

Perhaps sluggish performance is a result of demos given by people who intentionally attach one entire GB of 3D models to one session and use that to demonstrate (even though no 3D modeler would ever do such a thing).

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[reezle]

I do the IT for a cad shop, and we've run the range of video cards, settling on these Quadros (the sub $1000 models). I'd be very curious if this mod just gives the cheap card some of the accelerations the real card has, or if it can actually keep up in the real world. Not just running canned demos, but actually plugging away in Autocad all day long...

A benchmark of a couple of cards would be handy.
(but for the price of a video card, I suppose I could find out myself)

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[poopdeville]

What do you care? Your money isn't getting spent. This goes for both your fun benchmarking project and the video cards in the first place.

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[pipingguy]

That's the trick - there are so many combinations that a apples-to-apples comparison is impossible (and so expensive), so people go along with whatever the existing trend is.

I've not seen noticeable differences between a Quadro 256MB card and a generic 128MB card but perhaps my applications are different from other users'.

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[owlstead]

If you do, make sure to return the results to Tech ARP. Or post them in the forums of Guru3D, where the tuning app was made. Other people might be interested, and they did some hard work to create the applications.

Of course, if you look in the Guru3D forums, the hack isn't new, and I don't know what Tech ARP really did other than write a tiny article around it. Bring it in the spotlight I suppose.

http://www.guru3d.com/category/rivatunerfaq/

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I'm not sure. This sort of hack is "unsupported", meaning, if you run into any trouble at all, the CAD software maker, the computer maker and the video card maker do not have to help you. I think it's a nifty little hack, but if you depend on the CAD machine, getting the right card in the first place is less expensive than a day's worth of down time for a user + the tech trying to get it to work again.

The extra cost goes towards developing and maintaining a specific driver set for the very small number of people using a low volume piece of software. The driver will load different pieces, different versions of itself based on what software is running. That's because the software is aggressively tested with specific versions of the driver to work right. That sort of support isn't cheap, and that's what you get when you pay for a Quadro.

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[Anonymous Coward]

I just wonder when this hack will be listed as a copyright violation.

Yes - this is a troll post... But considering all those cases where threats of using the DMCA has been in the air this isn't completely off the target.

It's of course a valid point to make that consumer cards and professional cards are priced differently, but in the end a professional graphics user also expects faster response to a support issue for the hardware, which means that the cost has to be applied somewhere.

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[Znork]

From what it sounds like, the mod doesn't actually change anything, it just modifies the PCI id so the driver thinks the card is Quadro branded instead.

Like so much else in the 'corporate computing' world, it's merely rebranded generics, with a heftier pricetag. The hardware is usually the same, and probably in this case too. Much easier to use software to artificially prevent cross-market competition; as most corporate purchasers aren't spending money out of their own pocket they don't particularly care that they're getting scammed.

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[Alwin Henseler]

The hardware is usually the same, and probably in this case too. Much easier to use software to artificially prevent cross-market competition That means you're essentially paying a bonus for the software (the special driver set). The card double-serves as a dongle. In this case, one that's easily reproduced by modding the generic product.

as most corporate purchasers aren't spending money out of their own pocket they don't particularly care that they're getting scammed. Which I can understand from a people point of view, but not from a business perspective. Any well-run business should try to keep their costs down to a minimum. For instance a $600 premium could also buy you a nice set of office furniture instead.

So what exactly is it that these special drivers do, that the generic ones don't? Are the generic ones missing features (that the hardware does support), or is it the extra support & testing of hardware/software configurations that you pay for?

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[hairyfeet]

IIRC someone who used to work for Nvidia posted that the difference between the Quadro and the regular cards was the QA that went into output testing. Basically nobody cared if the consumer card didn't give you a pixel perfect representation of the data being sent it as long as it ran fast, smooth, and looked "close enough". Whereas with the Quadro they went through a lot more extra QA testing to make sure that it rendered the data it was sent accurately.But that is what I heard anyway,so I could be wrong.

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[billcopc]

It's easy to compare this to the recent Creative X-Fi debacle, but things are a bit different here.

If everyone stopped buying Quadros tomorrow, the company would stop developing those advanced driver features because I can imagine they're quite costly to develop and maintain (crazy testing!). There's also fanatical support that comes along with a Quadro... call them right up and they will often mash up a quick fix specifically for your issue in a matter of days, if not hours. They know Quadro users have a lot of money on the line for whatever they're designing.

If everyone stopped buying Creative X-Fi's tomorrow, and Creative stopped trying to market "high end gaming" sound cards, no one would starve. People would still have good sound, and professionals wouldn't even notice. Nobody serious about sound is using a Creative product anyway - maybe one or two weirdos with E-Mu gear but they're pretty quiet about it.

The prime difference between these two scenarios is value. When you spend the extra money on a Quadro, you get a lot more in terms of features and service. The hardware may well be the same, but the professional features directly affect your ability to get shit done, thus your bottom line.

When you pay $200 for a hackjob sound card, it doesn't give you an edge in your work and you certainly don't get high-class support. Try producing multitrack music on that fancy X-Fi, and call Creative with your sync issues, or the fact that the response curves look like an EKG, or your compatibility issues with Cubase and Logic. They will tell you to open up your list of installed programs and call everyone on that list, except Creative of course. At the end of the day you still won't have solutions to your problems, you'll only feel like you got scammed.

That is the main reason why Creative is hated and NVidia is praised, in their respective industries.

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[Molochi]

General consensus for the softmod ITFA in TechARP's own forum is that it doesn't actually improve pro app performance (GL, 3ds, etc..) for newer (later than 6800/NV45) GPUs.

It's kinda sad that this made the front page on slashdot.

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[billcopc]

I remember that from several years ago. The differences were one or two stray pixels. I personally could not appreciate their value, but it is definitely something a pro would want. There were also a few tradeoffs between gaming performance/rendering and accuracy, e.g. for antialiased wireframe rendering which is very common in pro environments, yet inexistent in games. You want those lines to be absolutely flawless when you're drawing that mechanical component.

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[Ihmhi]

What do you care? Your money isn't getting spent.

Right, but if he saves the institution's money, they might divert the surplus funds elsewhere. Like towards a raise for someone who saved them a few thousand dollars.

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[saleenS281]

Sometime after you graduate high school and get a real job you'll probably figure out that every business has a budget. You get to justify your expenditures on that budget to your boss, who reports to his boss on up the chain. Good luck justifying your purchase with "Well it's not my money, what do I care?".

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[pipingguy]

In engineering (real engineering, not software "engineering") I don't care about a few bad pixels or colour, I care about speed.

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[pipingguy]

Because you, personally, don't work with 3D engineering graphics on a day-to-day basis for a living? I do, and this topic is extremely interesting since much of the writing concerning 3D is related to gamers.

You'll likely never know what I'm talking about because the real world software where this is important is hideously expensive and esoteric. Download PDMS or SmartPlant cracks (if they are even available) and see if you can get them to work.

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[hairyfeet]

True, but if you were rendering CGI for commercials and movies (IIRC one of their biggest customer bases) you would care if the frames you were rendering don't match up,especially considering how long even on a multi core beast how long it can take to render those pixels. All in all, I say this hack is a nice trade off(If it doesn't get DMCA'd) as those that need the accuracy can get the Quadro,and those that need the speed can get the Geforce and hack it. Of course that is my 02c,YMMV.

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[entrox]

Sometimes after you get into a serious company, you'll probably figure out that having a supported configuration is worth much more than saving a few hundred bucks by using hacked cheapo hardware instead of the real thing. Maybe you'll even lose your patronizing attitude.

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[saleenS281]

...I'm in a serious company, and nothing I said advocated using cheap hardware. In fact, the entire point, which you missed entirely, is that wasting money just to see the result of hacked shitty hardware is a *BAD IDEA*. And doing so should, and most likely WOULD result in the loss of your job...

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[poopdeville]

Sometime after you graduate high school and get a real job you'll probably figure out that every business has a budget. You get to justify your expenditures on that budget to your boss, who reports to his boss on up the chain. Good luck justifying your purchase with "Well it's not my money, what do I care?".

My question wasn't about justifying cost, but asking why the poster gives a shit that the company uses the expensive cards instead of the cheap one. Maybe he can get a "free" card out of testing the cheap ones. Oops, not really -- even the testing unit would belong to the company. IN EITHER CASE, IT'S NOT HIS MONEY GETTING SPENT. Of course, I'm just a jobless high school dropout, apparently. Guffaw.

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[pipingguy]

Good point. But nVidia charges an extreme amount for the Quadro cards and I don't see any appreciable difference (network speed is a bigger factor, actually). Caveat emptor I guess.

My bitching is probably more better pointed towards the CAD magazines who are always touting the latest software and hardware (completely honestly, unbiased and critical of course).

The market is so specialized and narrow that there's little competition or feedback from actual users, and the software is so expensive and rapidly changing that no outfit that values their ad revenues dares to set up reliable test rigs and keep them current.

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[mikael]

CAD software vendors and 3D graphics hardware developers have their own test data sets run from automatic scripts. These have evolved from the design phases and from customer bug reports. They compare the results of the current software release against "perfect test results". If there is even one pixel of difference, this is investigated. This could be caused by something as low-level as a different internal floating-point algorithm in the hardware, or a different fixed-point precision.

This difference probably doesn't matter when you are shooting demons arriving from a portal on one of the moons of Mars, but it is a big issue if a component designed back in the mid 1980's, doesn't render now as it did back then.

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[GregPK]

Seriously, I was in an internship and my boss wouldn't even let me touch the inside of the computer to install new Ram Sticks.

Think about it, if something fails anywhere would you rather it be on the IT approved failure that you can get remedied for free. Or would you rather trying to explain to your boss that you hacked something to work and it took a weeks time fix.

Seriously, Cad shops, on average, are responsible for about 100 dollars an hour worth of work. At that rate, its in their best interest not to be down at all.

The difference between something that runs perfectly and something that is hacked is not something you want to explain to your boss. Especially when IT or someone else comes around to update the drivers, etc.

It's all about smoothness and transition when dealing with Cad. I've had a batch printing issue when working with retail focus files in MAP3D that took me a nearly a week to remedy.

This hack is great for students or those just starting out in the business. But, not in a full-time shop.

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using the software that this article is about -- RivaTuner -- for game development PCs for about 3 years now. It even works for something as intensive as 3D animation.
        The trick is to turn off all the unimportant acceleration features, which don't really provide any benefit in 3D model editing or animation software anyway. That way you don't stumble over any of the disabled chip features, that were factory degraded for yield price benefits. That is the real dirty secret about the difference between "professional" and "gamer" video cards -- the only REAL difference between Quadro and GeForce is the hedge against chip factory production errors. There is no way the minimal difference in clock speed and memory substantiates the difference in price. Some ISV versions of the GeForce cards have even better memory and clock speed than Quadro's. I bet those enhanced GeForce cards, combined with RivaTuner, make even faster workstations than Quadro's.
        All the Quadro drivers really get you, in this case, is more stable OpenGL operations. To keep software like Maya and 3DS Max from crashing, you have to turn off all the special features, like anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, anyway. Those features don't really factor into the game development phase, and we use software raytrace renders for cinematics, so CPU is more of a factor than GPU there. The only place where improved performance from the Quadro memory bandwidth is in OpenGL/DirectX shaded preview renders, but those are optional depending on the game pipeline. Using the game engine itself is always a better form of hardware render preview.
        I would like to see some CUDA benchmark differences between GeForce and Quadro hardware, when both are using the same Quadro drivers via RivaTuner. I suspect the difference does not substantiate the price:performance ratio difference.

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[leenks]

To be fair, I read your post the same way - it was as if you were suggesting one should save money because the boss cares about expenditure more...

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[dbIII]

It's AutoCAD from AutoDesk - the entire reason for it's existance is that it runs on cheap hardware. That is why people have been willing to overlook it's shortcomings for a couple of decades.

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[Anonymous Coward]

as opposed to the .. back page?

Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace

[cayenne8]

"Sometime after you graduate high school and get a real job you'll probably figure out that every business has a budget. You get to justify your expenditures on that budget to your boss, who reports to his boss on up the chain. Good luck justifying your purchase with "Well it's not my money, what do I care?".

I see you've never worked for the Federal/State Govt. or the DoD.

Heck, if they don't spend their entire budget....they won't get it all the next year, and they don't like that. You are often encouraged to spend. That and they won't really often let you do anything hacked...heck, it is hard to get them to allow FOSS at all in many circles. Nope...they feel much better spending on very $$$$ hardware and software, along with the service contracts that go with it.

Will it....

[Anonymous Coward]

But will it blend?

D'oh, sorry, force of habit. I meant, will it work with Blender? It's atrociously slow on a GeForce.

In fact, will it work on Linux full stop? It all appears to be MS based.

Re:Will it....

[Skinkie]

It would be interesting to see if it enables the Quadro features in the driver. (Stereo stuff...)

Re:Will it....

[t35t0r]

yes that would be interesting, but you'd still need a dongle like the nuvision 60gx NSR box to get the signal out of the dvi/vga connectors because it doesn't have a 3 pin mini din connection.

Re:Will it....

[t35t0r]

I wonder if you can use rivatuner in wine or if not then under windows then move the card to a linux box? Will the hardware mods remain?

Re:Will it....

[Skinkie]

The author of rivatuner is also part of the Nouveau project. For TV-out tuning we basically reused the RivaTuner code. Next to this, on *all* my old cards I have this DIN connection. Plus I guess the StereoGraphics hardware will work with an embedded signal.

Cool, but will pros use it?

[ramk13]

The mod seems simple and useful for some, but most of the people who use these programs work for companies who would probably spend a few hundred more dollars for a fully supported graphics adapter for their piece of software that costs thousands of dollars.

Re:Cool, but will pros use it?

[Reasonable Radical]

I doubt anyone outside a few hardcore individual users will use it. The idea of ANY business letting its employees physically modify their hardware is kinda ludicrous, and very few others will both hear about it and have a reason to do it.

Re:Cool, but will pros use it?

[Reasonable Radical]

I doubt anyone outside a few hardcore individual users will use it. The idea of ANY business letting its employees physically modify their hardware is kinda ludicrous, and very few others will both hear about it and have a reason to do it. Hate to do this to my own post, but since I didn't RTFA, I only deserve it... Disregard that, I suck cocks. *blush*

Re:Cool, but will pros use it?

[Jurily]

You're missing the point. You already bought the hardware, they're just not letting you use it fully.

It's about time for open drivers and sane business models.

Re:Cool, but will pros use it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Zeus, is that you?

Re:Cool, but will pros use it?

[Alwin Henseler]

I doubt anyone outside a few hardcore individual users will use it. A mod like this could be interesting for anyone who

• Has a suitable NVIDIA GeForce card
• Likes to play with any of these professional applications like Maya
• Doesn't want to pay for those applications, or the Quadro bonus

That group may be bigger than you think. Will probably include enthousiasts, people who just want to try out some of these professional applications, perhaps others. Will probably *NOT* include professional users.

Summarized: 'freeloaders', folks that wouldn't pay for the real thing anyway. Doesn't sound like anything that would threaten NVIDIA's business.

Re:Cool, but will pros use it?

[Anonymous Coward]

You already bought the hardware, they're just not letting you use it fully.

Your computer doesn't come with every program ever written, either. Does that mean they're just not letting you use it fully?

Re:Cool, but will pros use it?

[imboboage0]

I know you've already disregarded your own post, but I have a little insight to offer anyway.

I work at a fabrication machine shop. I am 17 years of age and I work all the time with multi-million dollar contracts. Many a time, a small change in machine programming by me has saved hundreds of thousands in material costs.

I am also their IT guy.

Myself and one other person do all of the CAD work. I find that oftentimes, our hardware feels underpowered. I've wondered why that is. As such, my employer ENCOURAGES me to dig deep and see what I can do to help. I'm asked to try out new ideas and see if they work well. That applies to every portion of my job, including out in the shop.

It has been amazing working in an environment where testing is allowed and encouraged. It creates a friendlier workplace where you can have fun and really think outside the box. To put it quite plainly, I feel horrible for anyone who works somewhere that they don't get to try out new ideas.

Re:Cool, but will pros use it?

[Anonymous Coward]

because a general purpose computer is so much like a special purpose proprietary graphics processing unit sitting on a proprietary graphics board.
yup.yup.yup.

Re:Cool, but will pros use it?

[GregPK]

Actually, you are wrong. The higher end version has more ram than the equivalent Ge Force. Also, everything on a Quadro card is tested to work perfectly before leaving the factory.

Since Nvidia does all of their manufacturing through the likes of foundries or third party chip manufactures. I'm willing to bet the tolerances for a Quadro card are significantly higher.

Like I said earlier, this hack is great for those who run their own shop. Students, or those starting out. But, no way would I want to run this in a shop where I and 2 others depend on it daily. Imagine if an autodesk update created an error in your driver and you had to upgrade to the next driver for the video card. Well, you can't go to Nvidia's website for this. You have to go out to the likes of Asus, Gateway, Dell, and hope they have the latest up there. Then, hope, pray that it works. If it doesn't then you keep pulling and installing different drivers till you get the error fixed. Autodesk is a very complicated program under the GUI. Trying to make it work or trick it into working is not an option that I'd want to explore unless I had time to waste. If you got a 100 thousand dollar project due in a week. Neither would you.

Re:Cool, but will pros use it?

[badasscat]

The first time one of your "new ideas" breaks your company's CAD software and your call to support goes unanswered because you were using an unsupported modification, thereby rendering thousands of dollars worth of both hardware and software pretty much useless, I expect your company will change their tune.

Companies that have been around long enough have usually learned the hard way that it pays to do things above board. Murphy's Law exists for a reason. Any failure point, given a long enough gestation period, *will* fail. And using an unsupported modification in a professional setting is, if nothing else, a failure point.

Re:Cool, but will pros use it?

[Shadowruni]

This is what I'd say as your boss:

That's great... but when something blows up, often to stay employed it's VERY nice to be able to say it's a 3rd party's fault.

In larger shops, like mine, the way to give IT a headache (and practically ensure us putting your request to bottom of the pile to rot) is to do your own thing. It's not that we hate competition, it's more along the lines of when patching 3,000 systems we don't like to have surprises like custom drivers that we didn't test against with our work-gen systems.

Another thing, let's say this custom app has a nice trojan that your AV totally missed. Let's say even further that it phones home and instead of reading your GAL it decides to start sending out CAD drawings to China. Don't be skeptical... this has actually happened.

Re:Cool, but will pros use it?

[imboboage0]

I can understand your view about a large shop, and I agree wholeheartedly. I still however believe that there should be one person whose job it is to break things. Someone should be assigned the task of doing what is thought to be impossible and pushing things to the limit.

Regarding the app having a trojan - that's highly unlikely in this case. You're just changing the PCI_ID of a card through software that has been trusted for years and years, then using a driver that has been trusted for years and years. I've actually done this before, back when I was in 9th grade or so. I was just messing around with it, making my card act as a Quadro instead of a GeForce. =]

Re:Cool, but will pros use it?

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is software. Quadro owners are purchasing the software. So yes, it is very much the same.

Think pirate copies of said software

[Anonymous Coward]

Then it makes sense to hack up a NvIdIa package. If you steal a $10k software package those $250 ARE a lot !! This is half the users of the software. 99% if in the eastern world.

Laptop (GeForce Go) support?

[cbhacking]

I doubt I would *need* to do so, but does this hack work on laptop nVidia cargs (their GeForce Go or Mobile series)?

I already use a desktop driver with a modded INF file from http://laptopvideo2go.com/ (nVidia's drivers for their older - 7600 in my case - laptop cards are crap, especially on Vista), so I'm not afraid of installing a desktop driver on a laptop, but might this driver make demands of the card that the mobile versions are incapable of?

Re:Laptop (GeForce Go) support?

[jamesh]

The article pretty clearly spells out that there has to exist a quadro card that has the same chipset as your current geforce card.

Re:Laptop (GeForce Go) support?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

There are mobile Quadros, so you just need to make sure your notebook is using the same die.

Re:Laptop (GeForce Go) support?

[AM088]

I've always wondered why on Linux laptop, the lspci command gave me
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G72M [Quadro NVS 110M/GeForce Go 7300] (rev a1)
Now I know :)

Summary is misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

The summary is a little misleading. When you render images in software like 3DS Max and Maya the graphics card generally plays no part in this irrespective of whether it is a Quadro or not. Excluding any in-house proprietary solutions some VFX studios might have the only exception to this is when you are using Nvidia's own rendering engine Gelato, which can make use of a Quadro card.

Re:Summary is misleading

[ThePhilips]

I do not have up-to-date info.

But in past, video cards were used to render previews and some special effects (e.g. particles). It wasn't pure hardware rendering - something was rendered in software, then blended together with with image rendered by/in hardware.

The main difference in the times was that cheap cards didn't supported all the fancy color spaces/modes nor did they had bandwidth to transfer huge textures (smaller parts of scenes pre-rendered in software) to cards.

Actual architecture introduced by nVidia (generic GPU responsible for everything) makes all that soft-modding possible. Besides some bus bandwidth issues (Quadros have wider internal buses) I do not see any problem with the hack.

I easily believe that drivers for cheaper GeForces might intentionally skip some advanced functionality, which isn't relevant to games, but is important to 3D modeling software.

Re:Summary is misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

(Quadros have wider internal buses).

That is incorrect. The ONLY differences are in silk screenings, the fact that PNY is the only official Quadro manufacturer, and the software (whether BIOS or drivers).

For any given Quadro card, there is an equivalent GeForce card of identical board design. The silicon is identical, and board traces are identical.

So...

[evanbd]

What exactly is this enabling? I get that it's for "professional" applications, but what features do those use that aren't turned on normally?

Re:So...

[jimicus]

What exactly is this enabling? I get that it's for "professional" applications, but what features do those use that aren't turned on normally? The application can ask the video card to perform some intensive work, farming it off from the main CPU of the PC for improved performance.

With the standard GeForce drivers, the video card will refuse to do this. However, with the Quadro drivers, it'll do it just fine.

The article tells you how to persuade the system to use Quadro drivers as opposed to GeForce. It requires some minor tweaking but it doesn't seem particularly dangerous.

Re:So...

[PopeRatzo]

Can I ask an uninformed question here? If these very expensive cards are virtually the same as the less expensive cards except for some software hack, why wouldn't gamers make use of the hack to mod their cards? Or is this already widely being done among the overclocking crowd? Or do these Quadro cards have no benefit for gamers?

There's something that bothers me about companies that sell the exact same product for two prices and the only difference is some switch is thrown on the more expensive one. But maybe there's more to it than that.

Re:So...

[Znork]

From what it sounds like, nothing. The 'professional' applications simply require the quadro driver (heck, the standard drivers might even be preventing acceleration if you have a process named 'autocad' running) and the quadro driver doesn't run on the consumer cards (not because of any hardware difference, but because it checks the pci id, which is what they change in the article).

Well, probably one of the main reasons NVidia doesn't want to open up their drivers.

Re:So...

[montge]

Ah, to your comment "There's something that bothers me about companies that sell the exact same product for two prices and the only difference is some switch is thrown on the more expensive one. But maybe there's more to it than that." There is something more to it...

While there may be only minor technical differences to the cards, the real difference is in the software. In a nutshell when you're buying the "inexpensive" card, you're not paying for the extra costs that NVidia (or ATI) incurs when they must expend resources to provide drivers that support the high-end applications. So unless you want consumers that could care less about the high end features to pay more, and the people that care about these features to pay less, you'll probably be happier with differentiated products in this way.

Don't forget companies are there to make money, and if they're not able to do this then either the company or product is likely to disappear. Personally I'd rather have NVidia around, if I need the high-end features, I'll figure out how to afford it...

Re:So...

[Otto]

Well, then it really sounds as if they ought to be selling the software separately in that case.

Bundling the software with the card is fine and all that, but if there's literally no real hardware difference, why have to "hack" the thing at all? Simply sell the pro-drivers separately, then if somebody needs them, they can buy them.

Re:So...

[evanbd]

I'm assuming the Quaddro drivers don't require it for no reason, though -- ie they actually use some features in it. What are those?

Re:So...

[drinkypoo]

Can I ask an uninformed question here? If these very expensive cards are virtually the same as the less expensive cards except for some software hack, why wouldn't gamers make use of the hack to mod their cards?

Because the Quadro's extra features are not beneficial to gaming. I have a Compaq nw9440 with QuadroFX 1500 graphics (256MB, PCIEx16.) The additional features are that you can have the card render to a buffer (GPU-accelerated rendering) and you can use 10 bits per channel (r,g,b) color. Whee! Neither is useful for gaming.

The additional color depth could be neat, if it's even used when your source textures only have 8 bits per channel. I don't know the answer to that. But let's face it, 24 bit color is probably enough for gaming and frankly, I never minded so much when I had to use 16 bit color back in the day because my computers were weak. this is pretty much the only cutting-edge system I've ever had and it was only cutting-edge for a month :)

There WAS a SoftQuadro hack for some of the older geforce cards which had corresponding quadros. Quadros were offered with a lot more memory too, which is not something you can fix with a driver... But the mobile quadros certainly don't have more memory, so there's nothing lost there...

Re:So...

[edwdig]

Because this approach is far, far simpler. NVIDIA doesn't sell to end users, they sell chipsets to partners who then manufacture the boards and sell them. NVIDIA prefers this as it greatly reduces their costs, and the partners prefer the current situation as they make a lot of money selling Quadro cards.

Also, these kinds of hacks haven't been very common. But if it was as simple as just installing a different NVIDIA driver, a lot of people would just buy the cheap card and pirate the better drivers.

Re:So...

[Svartalf]

Nope. What happens with the Quadro drivers more than anything else is that they do combining and optimization of immediate mode rendering
requests, namely doing "write this poly, now write this one, now write this one, etc..." which is the easier way to do CAD software rendering. It can
only be "sped up" by a little bit, taking advantage of the fragment shader path in a minimal manner. Games, on the other hand, present a command list to
the engine and then say "Go render this pool of commands, come back to me when you're done" to it. Major speed boosts are obtained because the stuff's
running in the host's memory, running in parallel on the host (in immediate mode you ask the chip to render and come back to you before issuing the next
command, meaning the stream processor's WAITING most of the time for you...). If you combine all the immediate mode rendering requests that occur between
a glBegin and a glEnd call, remove redundant operations, and then reorder operations so that the card will not waste steps, you end up with a fairly
massive speed boost with things like CAD software when using the special drivers.

What you're paying for is effectively a "dynarec" core driver for CAD operations to speed up the rendering on select GPUs.

Re:So...

[Chibi Merrow]

The additional features are that you can have the card render to a buffer (GPU-accelerated rendering)

Now I may be totally off base on this, but I'm pretty sure when I do render-to-texture type operations on a GeForce card they're hardware accelerated, and that is VERY useful for gaming (it's the most common way to implement "bloom" for instance). Most cards offer >10-bit color depth now, as well, which is useful for HDR type effects. Of course most monitors are still clamped to 8-bit, but that's besides the point... :)

Re:So...

[Eric Smith]

The application can ask the video card to perform some intensive work, farming it off from the main CPU of the PC for improved performance.

Any idea what specific APIs those are? Are they APIs that are specific to the Quadro cards, or are they also implemented by the FireGL cards?

Re:So...

[hxnwix]

People might resent paying so much for drivers and perhaps even pirate them. Additionally, a pro card can't come in a shiny box adorned with flaming skulls and naked ladies.

No. It's far, far better to sell them "different" hardware for much more. That way you can put it in the white box that adolescents would shun and charge more to recoup the many millions of dollars required to set bAllowWireframeAA = true.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

i have the firegl firestream 9170 softmod on my hd3870 ati card.
benefits - crisper colours from the driver, detailed rending of snow/rain effects in games, better sunlight/radiosity/camera whiteout/light rendering in games, noticeably better font display when working with 2D applications, richer colors in video playback.
the drivers also seem better since they probably got more qa and dont crash as often in games. also got a negligible increase in 3dmark06 ( and 10 bit options in the control center.

Re:So...

[xenocide2]

Developing software is a fixed cost. You only have to do it once per card. Fixed costs shouldn't affect the price of the device -- only if it happens at all. Price should be determined by how to maximize the term (Sale Price - Marginal Costs) * (# of Sales). Marginal costs are everything required to produce one more card (so unless quadro drivers are a larger binary, the driver is not marginally more expensive than a geforce). This works under the assumption, of course, that you can only charge one price for a device. Number of sales varies with price, so if you can charge people the people who'd pay $500 for it $500, and the people who'd pay $100 for it $100 , then your company "there to make money" could conceivably charge more to those high dollar customers by checking the PCI ID.

It's a shitty practice of course, since it relies on information asymmetry. nVidia knows more about their offerings than you or I do, and they can use this to their advantage.

Re:So...

[mikael]

Traditional CAD packages in the 1990's were built on top of Phigs and PEX, Phigs Extension to X.

Official specification

Other animation packages were built on top of proprietary API's like SGI GL and others. It was cheaper building an emulation layer mapping Phigs and SGI GL commands to OpenGL that to rewrite the applications altogether.

At present, the latest API is CUDA

Re:So...

[drinkypoo]

I'm pretty sure when I do render-to-texture type operations on a GeForce card they're hardware accelerated

I'm sure they are too, but I'm talking about rendering back to a region of memory on the system via DMA.

You can copy the frame buffer (obviously, or how would you take screen shots?) but that's not quite the same thing as having it initiated by the card, which reduces processor intervention and thus processor load.

Of course most monitors are still clamped to 8-bit, but that's besides the point... :)

Most monitors are CRTs and support an arbitrary number of colors - we would call it "infinitely" or "continuously" variable because they accept an analog signal and render it in an analog fashion, e.g., with intensity. There's an analog-driven transistor for each color in a CRT monitor, each one goes to an electron gun, and the more power you pump at the gun, the more electrons squirt out. No kidding :)

You're right about LCDs, though, most of which stop at 8 bits... LCDs have to do that funky A-to-D thing when they get a VGA signal. Of course, you can hand them DVI-D instead...

Re:So...

[mikael]

Render-To-Texture is particularly useful for doing shadow effects (render to the buffer to get the depth information, and do a perspective transformation to transform world-space coordinates into light-source coordinates).

Even a Geforce Go 5600 supports floating point textures.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you've nailed it. It is pretty much the exact same hardware, just different VGA BIOS, different part numbers and different drivers.

When Intergraph was still around (in 3D graphics that is), and for a period after 3Dlabs purchased Intergraph's 3D graphics division, there was cost justification for the super high priced "professional" graphics cards. At that time, the silicon was engineered from the ground up for the professional applications, and the OpenGL et al drivers were written for and tested against the pro apps.

Then Creative bought 3Dlabs, killed off the graphics card division entirely, and basically handed the professional market to nVidia. nVidia makes MASSIVE profit on the quadro cards. Their price has barely more than nothing to do with "the amount of resource dollars that go into development and testing against pro apps".

There are 6 million 3D games to be tested and optimized for. There are but a few dozen pro apps, and only a handful of heavy hitters that require anything close to substantial "driver engineer" resources.

The extra money paid for a Quadro is pure profit for nVidia. If they say different, go to a share holders meeting and take them to task on the performance of the "professional division".

It's simple economics. Businesses buy these cards as a tool to accomplish a job which makes said businesses money. They are willing to spend more for the "piece of mind" that comes with a card "built for business, NOT for gaming".

Same hardware, different *brand name*, vastly different cost.

Here's a prime example, the new Tesla cards for number crunching, NOT graphics. They have no DVI port, or ANY ports for that matter. Thus, it costs LESS to manufacture them but they sell for more. Why? Target market.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_c870.html

Did nVidia spend resources developing CUDA? Of course. Funny thing is, nVidia doesn't restrict CUDA to just the "pro" cards because it will have a future in consumer game "physics" in the near future. So, again, the software (i.e. driver) development costs are spread over all the divisions.

In summary, it's smart business. Fab one silicon chip to fit all market segments, and milk each segment for all the money you can. Is this wrong? No, it's called capitalism.

Re:So...

[PopeRatzo]

Because this approach is far, far simpler.

Simpler for whom? I don't see how it's any simpler, or better in any other way, for the consumer.

Full Analysis

[AuthorSimms]

Hey, I also work in an engineering field where we implement Quadro cards for visualization of largish process plants. I find this type of work much more intensive compared to for example 3D animation. Over the months and years I have seen quite a difference between standard and high-end video cards even though the cost between the two often is $550 or even higher at time. With slow $250 cards the walk throughs are effective when using the full viewing software.

Last time I checked geforces got better FPS..

[distantbody]

...than Quadro (workstation) GPUs.

Re:Last time I checked geforces got better FPS..

[Barny]

That's because the Quadro drivers are optimised for accuracy, since you are using them to do real calculations you will rely on, rather than small-ish floating point which is all the regular gforce allow.

There are some other things, optimised anti-aliasing for lines, interface layering over the top of render windows, etc.

For a quick and dirty explanation, see NV docs here (warning, pdf file), page 2 onward is where it gets interesting.

Re:Last time I checked geforces got better FPS..

[tokul]

Geforces are optimized for gaming (directx and your FPSes). Quadros are optimized for CAD (opengl). If same gpu is compared, memory bandwidth, FLOPS and fill rate are similar. Price is 400 USD for Geforce vs 2000-2500 USD for Quadro.

Quadro FX 5600 vs GeForce 8800 GTX

Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who would have guessed a driver would cost so much?

I guess now I see why NVIDIA is reluctant to release open source drivers for their hardware.

I guess this software, like any commodity, will approach zero marginal profitability over time.

Although it is perhaps occurring more quickly than NVIDIA would like I'm sure.

I wonder what their response will be?

Re:Is this for real?

[timmarhy]

quadro will still outperform the geforce by a mile. all this hack does is allow you to use quadro drivers on your geforce, not run your geforce like a quadro. this is only useful for students who can't afford a quadro. if you wanted to actually do anything really intensive you'll still need a quadro. they are most expensive for a reason you know.

Re:Is this for real?

[pipatron]

quadro will still outperform the geforce by a mile.

What makes you think that? Did you benchmark this mod and compared with a quadro with the same chipset? Do you think everyone that did so are liars? Or are you just working for nvidia?

Re:Is this for real?

[Alwin Henseler]

quadro will still outperform the geforce by a mile. Assuming the hardware is indeed different... So, exactly *which* Quadro and *which* GeForce are you comparing here? Which drivers? Which applications/benchmarks? Care to share some numbers, that people who have the same hardware can verify?

Re:Is this for real?

[aliquis]

I think he based it only on his "they are most expensive for a reason you know.", or what would be: They must be more expensive for a reason you know.

The argument that they would be much faster then geforce cards falls on: Why would nvidia not offer the fastest cards for gamers aswell? Some gamers are willing to pay for it.

So of course they offer the best they can make to everyone who wants it. No matter under what line name.

nothing really useful

[thermian]

I mean, sure, it's cool, but a software house using Maya and 3DS max would want to real gear, and people not in that category would be unlikely to need such a hack. Especially since you *really* don't want to be using hacked up code with your Gforce card.

This does not detract from the cleverness of those who did it, but in the final analysis it's virtually pointless.

Re:nothing really useful

[afidel]

Think graphics student. They probably have access to the software for their class but probably don't have the money for a card that costs as much as their desktop. Also as someone above pointed out there is no Quadro to Go card and laptops are popular with students (heck you might use it to give a presentation on a laptop in the professional world).

Re:nothing really useful

[evanbd]

Yup. Got that part. But what are the actual operations being performed, in more detail than "professional work"? Yeah, Maya, 3DS -- but how are those different from other programs that render 3D images?

Re:nothing really useful

[FauxReal]

I'm sure game modders would want this. I know my friend spends a lot of time rendering buildings and textures. Also, he recently did some freelance work rendering buildings for a local car commercial. So basically the 3D hobbyist will probably want to do this.

Re:nothing really useful

[darthflo]

There's quite obviously no Quadro to Go card, as nobody but Alienware (in one model, iirc) ever cared to implement swappable mobile graphics modules with the intent of actually selling different adapters.
There, however, are several notebooks equipped with mobile quadro chips, most notably Lenovo's ThinkPad Tp Mobile Workstations. There's even some T series ThinkPads (without the p) equipped with QuadroFX chips.

Also, note that the discussed hack identifies a GeForce series card as it's equivalent Quadro version. If there weren't any mobile Quadros, there'd be no PCI-ID to mimick and the driver would consequently not use it as a Quadro.

Re:nothing really useful

[mrchaotica]

About all I've ever figured out is that the so-called "professional" apps have code in them that says

if (card == quadro) {
run();
} else {
complain_that_you_need_a_quadro_card_and_refuse_to_work();
}

Re:nothing really useful

[acidream]

One of the main additions the quadro cards provide are hardware overlay planes which maya requires to draw certain gui elements

Re:nothing really useful

[Khyber]

"as nobody but Alienware (in one model, iirc) ever cared to implement swappable mobile graphics modules with the intent of actually selling different adapters."

That's a LIE. HP offers MXM-slot graphics in their nx9420 series of commercial laptops and higher, and in the DV series of consumer laptop. Have you ever shopped around for laptops with removable cards, before, let alone performed repair work for a company that manufactures cards with swappable graphics cards?

Re:nothing really useful

[darthflo]

I stand corrected. Haven't followed the MXM market all that much in the past few years, so I should probably have expected that.

Anyways, some quick googling indicates several no-name and even a few brands (Alienware, fsc, HP) actually implementing MXM -- impressive, you were totally right on that count. What you forgot to mention, though, is that people don't even try selling new cards. Check this. Even nVidia Staff (a Moderator) can only point to ebay and a rather dubious source (I don't mind one-person-enterprises, but if those cards are as popular as you're making them out to be, this looks fucking unprofessional).

Have you ever shopped around for laptops with removable cards

Nope. I like my laptops to be portable, robust and tend to use them for dull "work" purposes, so that's IBM/Lenovo all the way. I'm quite happy with the current state of removable cards in desktops, tho. The greatest advantage is cards actually being available.

[...] before, let alone performed repair work for a company that manufactures cards with swappable graphics cards?

Nope. I'm a wasteful person. If a notebook of mine breaks (which, thanks to IBM/Lenovo's quality engineering and the absolute lack of MXM cards), I'll simply eBay it off or retire it into my closet. Not having to perform repair work only gets beaten by one thing: not having to perform repair work on MXM-equipped laptops. Trust me, I enjoy it each and every single day.

Re:nothing really useful

[Khyber]

nVidia does produce MXM hardware, you just can't buy it from them direct. They sell their chips to manufacturers and the manufacturers produce the board. This is done to compete with Toshiba and Alienware, since their solutions are not cross-compatible, nVidia aims to dominate the upgradable laptop arena by providing a common-interface solution and removing hardware vendor lock-in.

GPL drivers

[trenien]

I guess this explain the unwillingness from NVidia to release the specs and allow people to make gpl drivers for their cards.

Re:GPL drivers

[Ant P.]

It's also proof that hiding your source code only delays the inevitable...

Re:GPL drivers

[drinkypoo]

The simple truth is that a lot of the "magic" is in the driver and they want to try to protect this stuff. However, an even simpler truth is that if you release your drivers then the public will help you write them. As intel has stepped into the 3D market with its open source drivers - easy to justify since they're not chasing the #1 spot in quality - the other makers have had to look hard at how their closed source is going to cost them in the long run. Both ATI (AMD) and nVidia have come around to the right idea, and now it's just a question of how long it takes to make their original drivers irrelevant :)

Re:GPL drivers

[edwdig]

Even if it was inevitable, they made a hell of a lot more money before it got figured out.

Re:GPL drivers

[Eric Smith]

Both ATI (AMD) and nVidia have come around to the right idea,

When did nVidia come around? If there's been any release of technical documentation on their chips, or any promise of it, I've somehow managed to miss the news.

Re:GPL drivers

[Copid]

Having ventured into the creepy world of computer graphics drivers (in embedded land), I've found that there's often another issue at work as well. A lot of graphics vendors (at least, a lot of the smaller ones) cross license stuff left and right, so at the end of the day, it's hard to figure out who owns what and who has the right to distribute what data sheets. If A licenses something from company B to make a chip, A often doesn't want to give you the data sheet for fear of raising the ire of B. They tell you to go to B for the details. When you call B, they tell you, "That's A's chip. We don't know anything about it," or, "I'm sorry, we don't entirely own the technology there. We can't tell you who we licensed our part from." The same mess holds true with wireless Ethernet chips.

I'm starting to think that some of the semiconductor industries are becoming so secretive that every time they put out a new product, they're going to start killing all their engineers and hiring a new "clean" batch for the next rev. It's amazing to me how hard it is for even a partner who buys the chips and integrates them has a hard time finding meaningful specs on some things.

Re:GPL drivers

[GXTi]

The fact is, the drivers are very nearly more important than the GPU. The GPU only does what you tell it to, and only the drivers know how to translate "draw this list of polygons" into the specific calculations that the GPU needs to execute in order to get the pixels into the buffer and onto your screen. If they open source their drivers, there isn't much left aside from a maze of twisty pipelines.

Of course, this is ideal if open source is their goal: anyone can write new code to get the GPU to do something completely different and very cool or useful. See for example the GPU version of folding@home (windows only), which uses NVidia GPUs to crunch numbers (though I believe it's done by adapting a shader API provided by the existing drivers), or even the PS3 version, as the PS3's SPEs are similar in nature to the average GPU in that they are specialized number-crunching units, unlike a CPU which is a generic logic unit designed to do a wide variety of things.

And even if they wanted to open source their drivers, both NVidia and ATI are beholden to various companies from which they have licensed technologies that are incorporated in the drivers, and so they would be violating contract by exposing it. It's quite likely that NVidia doesn't even have the source code to some of the things they link their drivers against in the first place.

Gaming performance may suffer

[Anonymous Coward]

This may slow down gaming performance. The author mentions this. However, there is a brief explanation of this on WIkipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadro

On Drivers

[Strake]

nVidia, like all corporations, is more concerned with serving its shareholders than its users, so they use dirty tricks like this in an attempt to force some users to shell out $600 more for the same product. Instead of focusing on producing the best hardware designs they possibly can and leaving driver development to the community, where the most good can be done (more platforms supported, using hardware to maximum potential, etc.), they capitalize on their monopoly on drivers for their products.

Kudos to TechARP for their hack.

Re:On Drivers

[Dreadneck]

I wonder how long before nVidia sues TechARP for screwing them out of the ability to screw their customers?

Re:On Drivers

[Jeff DeMaagd]

It isn't necessarily so evil. You interpret the value to only be in the circuitry, but the cost of the drivers to be able to use that circuitry is a different matter.

Game users is a very broad base, develop game-optimized drivers and you can develop very cheaply, per person.

The users of engineering software is a very tiny user base, and the cost of maintaining drivers for software that may have several thousand users instead of several million needs to by paid for by those that need to use the engineering software. The rendering for engineering software is optimized for accuracy, game drivers are optimized for speed. There is quite a disparity between the different user bases in size and what they need, so I don't have a problem with charging different prices.

Re:On Drivers

[ThePhilips]

If you actually RTFA, then you know that TechARP is innocent by-stander.

On other side, nVidia has a long story with RivaTuner which among others enables that hack too.

Driver encryption, option name mangling, registry tricks employed by nVidia drivers are precisely there to deter RivaTuner folks.

Re:On Drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

Even more so, those who really use these cards professionally, can in some countries get tax benefits, negating much of that price difference.

Re:On Drivers

[x_MeRLiN_x]

It's not the same product. If all you require when purchasing a graphics card is the hardware, good luck to you.

Tech ARP claims that the Quadro is much more profitable, but I wonder how they (and presumably you) can reach that conclusion. If the price premium is apparently justified by the additional software cost, then the profit margins are directly tied to development costs and number of cards sold. Without that information, you're both speculating.

And THIS is why they don't release specs!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing about "we cannot because we don't own all the IP" or any crap like that.

It's that both cards will do the same stuff (the cheaper cards may be using lower tolerance components) and we'd find out how to use the tech available rather than buy the expensive version that has the software to drive it.

Re:And THIS is why they don't release specs!

[TheRaven64]

My understanding is that the difference between the two lines is primarily the drivers. It's not that they are disabling functionality on the chip, it's that they only provide drivers for gaming applications with the consumer cards. If a professional modelling app uses OpenGL and GLSL then it will use these cards just fine. With the pro cards, they also provide optimised drivers for more specialist APIs. These may cost the same amount to develop as the OpenGL and DirectX drivers, but this cost is spread around a lot fewer people (the market for 3DS Max is orders of magnitude smaller than the market for whatever the latest FPS game is) and so these drivers cost a lot more per person.

If you are using the pro drivers with a consumer card, then you are using the drivers unlicensed, which is no different from using any other piece of software unlicensed. If you are doing this to run a pirated application better, then I doubt this will concern you, but if you are a business then it ought to.

If someone else wants to write drivers for all of these bespoke applications then nVidia couldn't complain, but I think they'd have a tough job recouping their investment.

Re:And THIS is why they don't release specs!

[Svartalf]

Heh... There's some extra silicon in the Quadros and little extra in the FireGL lineup. To be sure, it's not needed, but nice.

However, the difference in the drivers is that they've got a combine and optimize operation layer in the workstation drivers
that dramatically accelerates immediate mode operations. CAD, by it's nature, will be difficult to code for the mode of rendering
that games use- and it's difficult to accelerate past a point the immediate mode operations without some help. So, they provide
a special driver that does combining and optimization (dropping off of unknowingly done redundant ops, etc...) and hands it off
to the fast path rendering mode that games use.

If you want to gain most of the speed, skip using the stuff unlicensed- all someone needs to see a good portion of the speed
would be to write an intercept DLL or LD_PRELOAD .so that does at least the combining of immediate mode ops. Now, this is
making it sound vastly easier than it would be to do (Writing it and getting it right is NOT simple or easy- period...) but
it IS doable and it explains why they ask a larger price for the workstation cards than they do for consumer parts more than
anything else.

Re:And THIS is why they don't release specs!

[Dysproxia]

If you are using the pro drivers with a consumer card, then you are using the drivers unlicensed, which is no different from using any other piece of software unlicensed.

Likely untrue. The "License For Customer Use of NVIDIA Software" that you're supposed to click through for every driver available on their site doesn't even seem to tie you to Nvidia related hardware.

Laptop fx1600m

[egnop]

I read some articles about the subject in the OP, now I got a Compaq8710w Laptop, it has a FX1600M in it, I wonder if I would benefit doing this the other way round since I don't do any 3d stuff and like to play games on this machine... (oh and btw, it does run smoothly on most of the games now)

Probably not, since the hardware tend to be slightly slower.

Any idea's?

Re:Laptop fx1600m

[aliquis]

Since people say the Quadro drivers renders more precisely but slower and the Geforce ones less accurate but faster I would guess that you would indeed get better gaming performance with regular 8700m gt drivers.

If it's only software (and eventually a firmware flash with no risks, if that's possible on any firmware flash ..) why not just try it out and see? But I'd take speed over accuracy for games any day :) (The images move around a lot anyway, who look into details?)

Conspiracy?

[ThePhilips]

I guess now I see why NVIDIA is reluctant to release open source drivers for their hardware.

+10

Re:Conspiracy?

[fbjon]

"Conspiracy"? More like "business".

Does the GeForce 8600M GT accelerate 3D rendering?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wondering if this card, which is the one in the MacBook Pro accelerates 3D rendering. I just went to the Apple store yesterday and I was told that this card would make my 3D modeling and rendering a lot faster.

Any truth to this at all?

I remember Geforce to Quadro conversion

[flyneye]

Last time I did that I moved two micro-resistors.
I just used a jewelers loup and a small tip on my soldering iron.Found the instructions online somewhere.Worked well.

Only it doesn't work

[da.phreak]

I've had a look at the forum thread linked at the very end of the article. Softmodding only works up to the Geforce 6x00 series. It seems that after that NVidia put in some more checks than only the PCI ID. As reported in the thread, there's no performance increase in professional 3D apps, and OpenGL is broken.

Re:Only it doesn't work

[WilyCoder]

"Softmodding only works up to the Geforce 6x00 series."

Wrong. Here are instructions for softmodding a Geforce 8800 GTS:

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33898714

Also, the main thing you are paying for with a quadro card is support. You are given access to the driver development team. If you find a bug they will fix it in short time.

Re:Only it doesn't work

[Anonymous Coward]

Softmodding only works up to the Geforce 6x00 series. As I remember, even with 6000 series it was limited to specific cards and specific card revisions. I've heard some rumors about a 8800 GT Bios mod that would make it a quadro but never looked it up.

The ATI cards have SoftFireGL mods for even the latest cards, but they require modifying the drivers

Re:Only it doesn't work

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I thought I read a new SoftQuadro hack, yet it only describes about the old NVStrap hack which only works with older geforce cards which is capable with any driver related quadro hacks. Geforce 7 and higher have many more extra checks to prevent them to be softmodded (or hardmodded) to a Quadro.

Re:Only it doesn't work

[GregPK]

There are problems though.

It doesn't work with OpenGL extensions it does accelerate out the Direct 3d extensions though. It's not as fast as the higher memory capacity quadro cards. But its a huge increase over the stock GeForce.

You still don't get the same tolerances as a standard Quadro. Granted the price is a lot less. But in a Cad Shop where you are consistently working on 200k+projects would you want to take the slightest chance of their being a rendering or upgrade issue? A day there can cost you 10k.

Actually, a good business model

[MasterOfGoingFaster]

I'm sure it seems evil to you, but not to a lot of engineers that use this stuff. In the old days, we spent $6000 or more on 3D graphics cards. Along comes nVidia with the Quadro cards at really affordable prices. They achieve this by using components that work for both gamers and engineers. So rather than spreading the cost of chip development across a somewhat small number of users, nVidia creates a do-all chip and can spread the development costs across a much larger community. We don't mind paying the extra costs of higher quality components, more RAM and application-specific drivers. The only other business model I see working is for nVidia to charge separately for the CAD drivers, which would reduce the cost of the hardware. But that creates a huge problem with pirating. So it's not unreasonable to view the Quadro product line as a card + software package, with the card itself acting as a copy protection device. And I'm OK with that, because it is non-intrusive. Anytime I need a new driver, I can download it. It's easier to get the boss to pay for the card when I get a new workstation than to justify the purchase of drivers. So their business model works fine for professional use.

Any real comparisons?

[Whatanut]

Are there any real comparisons out there regarding the hardware? My understanding about the difference between the high end cards and the pro cards wasn't really about processing speed. It's more about detail. The high end cards have a much higher accuracy along with support for more lighting in hardware, etc. when rendering while gaming cards sacrifice some of the accuracy for increased performance. Could be that is all in the drivers...

Everytime I get a new quadro card in at work I usually throw 3dMark at it just to see how it does. It's usually not all that impressive with regard to speed.

Re:Any real comparisons?

[rogermcdodger]

If you look at the SPECviewperf benchmarks for the Quadro cards and then track down some for the gaming cards based on similar hardware (there aren't many online) you should see that the Quadros can offer vast improvements in performance when working on complex models.

Of course 8600M GT accelerates 3D rendering

[Morgaine]

All recent nVidia and ATI graphics cards accelerate 3D. Why wouldn't the 8600M GT?

The 8600 GT is a fairly good low-to-mid-range desktop card, and on my 2.33GHz Core2Duo-powered desktop it runs glxgears at around 5540 FPS.

The lower-power 8600M GT is a very good laptop card, and on my 2.0GHz Core2Duo-powered laptop it runs glxgears at around 5150 FPS.

For reference, a non-accelerated glxgears runs at a mere 250 FPS or so. Clearly the 8600M is providing good 3D acceleration, and is keeping up quite well with its desktop sibling.

Re:Of course 8600M GT accelerates 3D rendering

[Anonymous Coward]

then what's the point of this article?

"Quadro drivers allow the Quadro to be used to accelerate the rendering operations of such professional 3D applications while GeForce drivers do not."

This clearly states that that GeForce drivers don't accelerate rendering in professional 3D applications.

Re:Does the GeForce 8600M GT accelerate 3D renderi

[Shatrat]

All graphics cards accelerate 3D rendering.

Quadro vs Geforce Driver quality revolves

[fast turtle]

around the OpenGL certification, which involves far more testing of the GPU design then the Geforce models go through. The second issue is that a CAD shop doesn't care why the card screwed up - they simply want Nvidia/ATI/who-ever to fix the problem. This actually involves a legal Liability issue because if any design errors are resolved back to either the application (CAD/CAM) or the GPU (Quadro/FireGL) then the designer can push any legal claims for damage onto deeper pockets then theirs.

As a end-note, the cost of Quadro & FireGL cards is no longer $1000.00 dollars as both Nvidia and ATI have released budget versions (older chips) that still function well.

Quadro vs GeForce according to NVIDIA

[rgo]

http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro_geforce.html
The whitepaper says that Quadros have got support for window clipping, hardware accelerated clip planes, antialiased wireframe rendering, more memory, etc. Although it doesn't say if the hardware accelerated features do exist in the GeForce family but are disabled by software.

Quad-Buffered Stereo support?

[kungfu_larry]

Does anyone know if this hack (or another) can provide a Quad-Buffered Stereo environment? Are there technical limitations anyone can think of? This environment is required for many applications that work with Planar or Nuvision 3d displays.

Re:Quad-Buffered Stereo support?

[Anonymous Coward]

yes. i have the ati firestream 9170 softmod for my hd3870 and it offers a quad buffered stereo option in ccc.

Softmod doesn't work on GeForce after 6800

[Anonymous Coward]

It might report that it's a Quadro, but it doesn't actually unlock anything.

If you want a working mod for a modern card, go to guru3d.com and look at the rivatuner forums. Most of the Radeon 2XXX/3XXX series can be modded to fully operational FireGL.

Works the other way too

[Prien715]

I recall a year ago or so borrow a Quadro 1300 from work (my video card bit the dust), and Civ4 and other games just sucked...until I force-installed the GeForce rather the the Quadro drivers for Windows.

Not only was it playable now, I could turn the resolution all the way up;)

Could just be a difference in the age of the drivers though. Quadro drivers are typically much more conservative performance-wise than GeForce ones and thus release changes much more slowly.

Lawsuit Knocking

[Nom du Keyboard]

Can an Nvidia lawsuit be far behind?

Don't waste your time

[ChaseTec]

After getting tired of visual glitches in Autocad and 3DS Max I tried this on my desktop (GeForce 6800) and my laptop (GeForce 7900 Go). The 6800 was the wrong revision and this couldn't be done. However it worked for the laptop in the since that I could install the Quadro drivers from Nvidia's website. What didn't work was installing the MAXtreme and Powerdraft Quadro-only accelerated drivers for Autocad and 3DS Max. They could still detect the card was not a Quadro. The best thing to do if you want to fix video glitches or improve 3d performance is to update to the latest drivers for your card and use the most recent versions of Autocad (2009) and 3DS Max. Autocad in particular will give you a lot less headaches now that it's switched from using OpenGL to Direct3D. The performance difference between a Quadro and a regular GeForce card is also much smaller now.

Ah...

[Rix]

This would be why they won't release the source to their drivers, then.

How about in reverse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can this be done in reverse? For example, I have a Quadro FX 2500M built into my laptop (Dell Precision M90). Can I revert to the standard GeForce drivers and improve my gaming performance?

3rd party fabbers?

[FluffyWithTeeth]

So my understanding is that the Quadros are physically the same as the normal cards, but cost more and use drivers with specific additional features.

Do nVidia charge a lot for the Quadro branding, or include a contractual statement that vendors must charge extra for cards that identify as Quadros? Surely otherwise one of the fabbers would sell a version of the card that identifies as a quadro, but for a fraction of the price.

Re:3rd party fabbers?

[GregPK]

The design of the GPU is essentially the same, but the tolerances are tighter memory capacity is higher. Driver support is higher, errors are less.

Basically unless you are a student or someone working on low budget projects. You'd rather be working with the best you can get Quadro.

Take for example a 100 million dollar movie like say Toy Story or Spider Man. Which would you trust? a hacked Nvidia Ge Force series card? Or would you rather get the Quadro to minimize all down time?

Re:3rd party fabbers?

[nuzak]

They can sell at whatever price they want, but the license for the Quadro brand costs much more, and there is probably a requirement for much more QA.

QA drivers?

[antdude]

So are Quadro drivers way more stable than the GeForce ones? NVIDIA's drivers suck these days. They're not good as 8x.xx ones IMO.

Re:QA drivers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows ones I assume? Have found the linux drivers great.

Re:QA drivers?

[antdude]

Yeah. Linux drivers are decent. Better than ATI/AMD!

Re:Does the GeForce 8600M GT accelerate 3D renderi

[Anonymous Coward]

then what's the point of this article?

"Quadro dri vers allow the Quadro to be used to accelerate the rendering operations of such professional 3D applications while GeForce drivers do not."

This clearly states that that GeForce drivers don't accelerate rendering in professional 3D apps.

Precisely

[Sycraft-fu]

It's like saying "Why use RHEL when you can get CentOS for free?" Because with RHEL I'm not really paying for software, I'm paying for support. If something goes wrong they are willing to spend time to fix it, whatever that fix ends up requiring.

This might be useful if you are a university student who's got a cheap copy of CAD software to play with (much like CentOS is useful for the same student to learn about enterprise Linux) but this isn't some coup that is going to screw nVidia. Pros are still going to buy the Quadros to get the support. As a practical matter, they are probably spending way more on the software anyhow.

Awesome!

[Molochi]

That's a great idea!

We could just stick all of ScuttleMonkey's subs there. JK.