That isn't entirely true. There are a few seemingly minor advantages with workstation hardware that does account for high-costs. It wasn't till after the Pentium 4's started reachig 3gHz did 64-bit PC's started to appear on the market. But, archaic workstations, such as Sun Ultra 10, were 64-bit even when their processors were only 333mHz.
It might not seem important to some, but to those who back in the mid 90's, wouldn't pay 5k for a 64-bit system didn't need one back then, and those who would usually did need it.
The higher-quality cards do seem to have only minor differences, but those differences are expensive to manufacture, and they do give the edge to professionals that amatuers wouldn't have with consumer products.
True, those kinds of hardware tend not to be user-friendly. If for some reason, your application would have some glitch and was having compatability issues with the card, the manufacturer would assume that you would write your own driver to solve the problem.
Speaking of CPU, I wonder how ideal is using a Pentium Xenon processor for amateur 3D rendering.
Power, that's it. High-end workstation graphic card is designed for situations that require simulation-related scientific computing, or movie and game development. Whereas the high end gaming cards don't have to be that powerful to play nice looking games. They can be good for rag-doll physics, and other entertainment related simulation, but game cards aren't ideal for studying the double-helix structure of DNA or predicting missile trajectories.
Note: However, although gaming PC's usually dwarf the consoles in terms of performance, every once in a while the Japanese manufacturers (this means Microsoft isn't included) produce consoles with workstation or beyond quality. For instance, the new PS3 cell processors, which are used by IBM for clustered computing and supercomputers. However, Sony uses these same processors for console games, and sell each unit for much less than what it's worth. They can afford to do this, because Sony makes profit in the games you buy.
A PS3 is reported to have broken ciphers within hours, whereas most high-end personal computers would take days to do the same.
Kind of got off-topic, here, but in general gaming cards aren't too reliable in terms of mathematics computing power when compared to workstation graphic cards. Which is why they're so fucking expensive. Even archaic models tend to be pretty pricey. At least Dell is selling "affordable" workstations by seemingly close to desktop-quality PC's, but with some workstation-quality hardware. Sun, on the other hand, sell their shit for like 10k, 20k, even 1mill. IBM, it seems, is a little cheaper than Sun but more so than Dell.
Yeah, those bitches are expensive, too. Workstations that is. At my university, most people prefer using the windows systems or their own laptops in the computer science labs. The UNIX, Sun Solaris systems aren't normally the preferred choice for us, with the exception of times when we're required to write programs in a UNIX OS. Yet, I didn't know until recent that those SunBlades are $17,000 US computers!
The only thing is they're hard as Hell to configure, and it doesn't look like they're very high quality, in terms of the shitty desktop layout. I hear that these computers are locked from allowing us to install software, so thus is why we can't seem to use Eclipse on them. But, if I could get ahold of the some admin rights, I could probably make some bad-ass pc games.
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That isn't entirely true. There are a few seemingly minor advantages with workstation hardware that does account for high-costs. It wasn't till after the Pentium 4's started reachig 3gHz did 64-bit PC's started to appear on the market. But, archaic workstations, such as Sun Ultra 10, were 64-bit even when their processors were only 333mHz. It might not seem important to some, but to those who back in the mid 90's, wouldn't pay 5k for a 64-bit system didn't need one back then, and those who would usually did need it. The higher-quality cards do seem to have only minor differences, but those differences are expensive to manufacture, and they do give the edge to professionals that amatuers wouldn't have with consumer products.
True, those kinds of hardware tend not to be user-friendly. If for some reason, your application would have some glitch and was having compatability issues with the card, the manufacturer would assume that you would write your own driver to solve the problem. Speaking of CPU, I wonder how ideal is using a Pentium Xenon processor for amateur 3D rendering.
Power, that's it. High-end workstation graphic card is designed for situations that require simulation-related scientific computing, or movie and game development. Whereas the high end gaming cards don't have to be that powerful to play nice looking games. They can be good for rag-doll physics, and other entertainment related simulation, but game cards aren't ideal for studying the double-helix structure of DNA or predicting missile trajectories. Note: However, although gaming PC's usually dwarf the consoles in terms of performance, every once in a while the Japanese manufacturers (this means Microsoft isn't included) produce consoles with workstation or beyond quality. For instance, the new PS3 cell processors, which are used by IBM for clustered computing and supercomputers. However, Sony uses these same processors for console games, and sell each unit for much less than what it's worth. They can afford to do this, because Sony makes profit in the games you buy. A PS3 is reported to have broken ciphers within hours, whereas most high-end personal computers would take days to do the same. Kind of got off-topic, here, but in general gaming cards aren't too reliable in terms of mathematics computing power when compared to workstation graphic cards. Which is why they're so fucking expensive. Even archaic models tend to be pretty pricey. At least Dell is selling "affordable" workstations by seemingly close to desktop-quality PC's, but with some workstation-quality hardware. Sun, on the other hand, sell their shit for like 10k, 20k, even 1mill. IBM, it seems, is a little cheaper than Sun but more so than Dell.
Yeah, those bitches are expensive, too. Workstations that is. At my university, most people prefer using the windows systems or their own laptops in the computer science labs. The UNIX, Sun Solaris systems aren't normally the preferred choice for us, with the exception of times when we're required to write programs in a UNIX OS. Yet, I didn't know until recent that those SunBlades are $17,000 US computers! The only thing is they're hard as Hell to configure, and it doesn't look like they're very high quality, in terms of the shitty desktop layout. I hear that these computers are locked from allowing us to install software, so thus is why we can't seem to use Eclipse on them. But, if I could get ahold of the some admin rights, I could probably make some bad-ass pc games.