Pinging Benjamin Gawert Quadro vs GeForce

I read your comments from a few months ago and came away a bit
puzzled. On the one hand it sounded like there was little difference
in GAME performance between a Quadro and a GeForce but then you seemed
to say there was. I guess I need a little clarification. Were you
referring specifically to games that use OpenGL or does that include
Direct X as well and how would you compare the two lines? Is a Quadro
80% as fast in games? 90%? Close enough that you'd need to benchmark
them? The reason I ask is I am current specing out a home machine and
intend to use it both for the ocassional game and for
SolidWorks/Rhino/max. BTW if you don't mind me asking what do you
do for a living that requires an Quadro SLI configuration? :-)

* :
I read your comments from a few months ago and came away a bit
puzzled. On the one hand it sounded like there was little difference
in GAME performance between a Quadro and a GeForce but then you seemed
to say there was.

Indeed there is. One reason is that most Quadro cards use lower clock
rates than their Geforce counterparts (especially for memory). Another
reason is that the Nvidia driver switches to quality-optimized display
mode when detecting a Quadro which is slower than the
performance-optimized mode used by Geforce (btw: that has nothing to do
with the quality/performance slider in the Nvidia options)...

I guess I need a little clarification. Were you
referring specifically to games that use OpenGL or does that include
Direct X as well

It's valid for both...

and how would you compare the two lines? Is a Quadro
80% as fast in games? 90%? Close enough that you'd need to benchmark
them?

Hard to say. The difference because of the driver optimization is very
small (usually a few percent and hardly noticeable). Depending on the
Quadro models the difference in clock rate is noticeable, though.

The reason I ask is I am current specing out a home machine and
intend to use it both for the ocassional game and for
SolidWorks/Rhino/max.

Well, honestly, if your system is powerful enough I doubt the
performance loss with a Quadro is really noticeable. I mean who cares if
you get say 130fps instead of 140fps?

As to what to get (Geforce or Radeon), I'd make that dependend on if you
do that mostly for hobby or if SW/Rhino/3DSM has to be done for a
living. If it's more a hobby then I'd say a Geforce card is more than
enough, just get a quality Geforce card (i.e. PNY, which btw is also the
only Nvidia board partner for Quadro cards) without overclocking or any
fancy BS. If you do that for a living then getting a Quadro usually is
worth the investment, but in this case I'd also strongly recommend not
to build a system by yourself but get a certified workstation from a
brand with good service (i.e. HP or Dell). Don't worry, if you're in the
highend class the price difference isn't that big compared to DIY. But
you get a certified system with good and reliable support, something
which is just unvaluable when you have to make money with your computer.

BTW if you don't mind me asking what do you
do for a living that requires an Quadro SLI configuration? :-)

Besides gaming (which was one of the main reasons for SLI) I do a lot of
CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) calculation on the machine (thus I
need strong CPUs and lots of RAM), some Visualization and MCAD, too
(that's why I need the Quadro). MCAD doesn't need that much gfx power
but Visualization does.

BTW: it's not SLI anymore ;-) I retired my HP dual Opteron workstation
because I needed more performance and also the option for more than 32GB
RAM, so I moved to a HP xw8400 dual XEON 5160 machine with single Quadro
FX5500 1GB.

Benjamin