Geforce vs Quadro Pro/E

[ThomasPhore]

I am looking at new Nvidia cards to accelerate both my Pro/E and rendering that uses the Mental Ray engine. The Mental Ray engine requires as many Cuda cores as you can afford to go fast. The Geforce cards give you like twice the bang for the buck of Quadro cards when it comes to Cuda cores. And these days the Geforce cards also have plenty of ram (used to be something the Quadro cards had big advantage in).

Is there really a big reason to go for Quadro over Geforce when Geforce cards have so much more powerful hardware for the money? I know Quadro cards are supposedly optimized more for CAD in their drivers and what not. But how slow can the Geforce cards be when for the same money they have twice the hardware "horsepower"? I know that Nvidia's profit margin on Quadro cards is incredibly higher than on the Geforce cards.

Does anyone here have experience with running modern Geforce cards and how they compare with Quadros?

Secondly, can anyone tell me whether or not Pro/E is able to benefit from multiple Nvidia cards in SLI? I seem to recall that it is not able to take advantage of SLI'd cards well, but perhaps that has changed by now.

[ptc-191798]

I'll be short and sweet.

1) SLI not supported. It's a programmed feature and is best suited to games. Newer cards skip this route more often now by planting 2 main GPU units to a card.

2) You need to ascertain the benefit. However, the short of it is:

• Geforce and Quadros share same chipset - EVEN
• Geforce errors on speed, Quadros on fidelity - WIN geforce, unless you are doing medical imagery
• Geforce has no driver support - WIN Quadro
• Geforce are overclockable - WIN geforce
• Quadro has explicit drivers to applications - WIN Quadro
• CUDA on both - EVEN (if you match GF to quadro on chip, you'll match streams)
• 30bit+ output - WIN Quadro (to my knowledge, Geforce do not support the higher bit output)

These are the main points, others can chime in with their own. Bottom line is if you can forgive the odd shading error (rare) and do not need to rely on precise visual display quality (i.e. medical imagery, stereoscopic) then go with Geforce. If you need the comfort in driver support to your application and tech support to driver issues, go Quadro.

I would say for CAD that Geforce is quite fine and if you are using GPU render engines to support your CAD imagery then you get bonus of utilizing CUDA cores and opengl shading speed for a lot less.

If you are also heavy into colour matching and rendering/compositing then the Quadro may be more suited to your needs.

[BenLoosli]

One factor to consider is that GeForce cards do graphics processing using DirectX and Quadro cards do OpenGL.

CAD systems use OpenGL, games use DirectX.

They will work, but you aren't taking advanatge of the GPU by using a GeForce with a CAD system because the OpenGL processing has to be done in software on the main CPU.

[BurtLand]

You guys are offering bad advice ...

Quadro - supported by PTC

GeForce - not supported by PTC

That says it all.

If you want to start trying to sort out missing graphics artifacts then go ahead and buy a GeForce - theres lots of discussions about trying to fix them with no full solution.

[User_CREO]

[BenLoosli]

GeForce used in MS Surface, not workstations or workstation-class laptops!

Read Note 1 below the chart.

Like I said 9 years ago, they will work BUT you will not be getting optimal performance and the number of files you can open may be limited.