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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.'"
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).
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.
...than Quadro (workstation) GPUs.
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.
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.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
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.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
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...
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them