Performance of various Quadro graphic cards

[gchampoux]

We are going to buy a bunch of CAD PC's soon, and I need to select a good graphics card.
(Fast, but not too expensive)
For the past few years, we have been using the Quadro 580, and most recently the Quadro 600.
Even though these are low-end, they work exceptionally well in Wildfire/Creo.

I have been reviewing different Quadro cards, and find that there is conflicting information regarding their Pro/E performance.
The nVidia benchmark results for proe-05 shows little difference between any of their cards.
In fact, their low-end cards are among the fastest for Pro/E, and their high-end cards are among the worst. How can this be?
http://www.nvidia.com/content/PDF/product-comparison/Product_Comparison_Oct_2012.pdf

Tom's Hardware shows differently for proe-05. Their results are more consitant with what I would expect.
(faster in general = faster in Pro/E)
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/workstation-graphics-2012/05-Pro-ENGINEER-0-x-AA,3116.html

Olaf's benchmarks are inconclusive. The fastest PC's commonsly have the Quadro 4000.
But when I look at the graphic results alone, they tend to be tied to the overall system performance.
The Quadro 4000 performs slowly when used in a slower PC.
In other words, when I ranks the results by graphic card results, there is no clear trend.
http://www.proesite.com/

Maybe I should stick with the Quadro 600, or the newer Quadro 410.

P.S. We have no need for photo-realistic rendering. The basics are all we need.

Gerry Champoux
Williams International
Walled Lake, MI

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[JonathanHodgson]

Hi Gerry,

It might be interesting to install something like nVidia Inspector or GPU-Z that can show a graph of GPU usage, and keep an eye on it while working on your normal assemblies, etc, on your current PCs. In particular, remember to glance at the graph whenever you feel Pro/E is bogging down to see whether the GPU is maxing out.

This will give you an idea of whether your current systems are close to being GPU-limited, or whether your 'low-end' cards have headroom to spare for what you're currently doing.

From what I've seen on our machines (Xeon W3550 with Quadro FX 3800) the GPU is rarely above 10% unless using transparency.

HTH,
Jonathan

[StephenW]

Gerry,
I just recently benchmarked the Quadro 2000, 4000 and 5000 on WF4 and WF5(creo elements/pro). The 2000 performed just as well as the 4000 and 5000. (Dell Z400 and Z420 workstations)

BUT, according to Bernie Gruman, Creo 2 will start using the graphics card more efficiently and performance will improve significantly when using the high end cards.

If I was you, I would get a representative computer and one of each of the various graphics cards and load up the OCUS benchmark. If you get ODD results, make sure you get the chipset drivers all updated properly as we were getting really really poor numbers in the beginning and it took quite a bit of trial and error to figure out the graphics issues.

On my specification, we opted for the Quadro 2000 based on the fact that we are not upgrading software anytime too soon.

Steve