Difference between nVidia Quadro and Geforce cards?
I'm not a 3D or HPC guy, but I've been tasked with doing some research into those fields for a possible HPC application. Reading benchmarks, comparisons and specs between nVidia Quadro and Geforce cards, it seems that for similar generation cards:
- Quadro is 2x-3x the price of Geforce
- hardware wise, the differences are not that great
- in benchmarks (3ds Max, Maya and some others) Quadro cards are much better performing than Geforce ones
Does anyone know what are the exact and precise technical differences that can cause such better performance? My speculation (and what can be generally read on the net), since the hardware is of similar specs, is that it's all in the drivers. If that's the case, what kind of functionality do the Quadro drivers offer that programmers of 3ds Max and other have taken advantage of?
Of course, I'm not interested in marketing speak: higher business value, professional oriented, better support, better QA, etc...
Answer
The difference is in view-port wire-frame rendering and double-sided polygon rendering, which is very common in professional CAD/3D software but not in games.
The difference is almost 10x-13x faster in single-fixed rendering pipeline (now very obsolete but some CAD software using it) rendering double sided polygons and wireframes:
Thats how entry level Quadro beats high-end GeForce. At least in the single-fixed pipeline using legacy calls like glLightModel(GL_LIGHT_MODEL_TWO_SIDE, GL_TRUE). The trick is done with driver optimization (does not matter if its single-fixed pipeline Direct3D or OpenGL). And its true that on some GeForce cards some firmware/hardware hacking can unlock the features.
If double sided is implemented using shader code, the GeForce has to render the polygon twice giving the Quadro only 2x the speed difference (it's less in real-world). The wireframe rendering remains much much slower on GeForce even if implemented in a modern way.
Todays GeForce cards can render millions of polygons per second, drawing lines with faded polygons can result in 100x speed difference eliminating the Quadro benefit.
Quadro equivalent GTX cards have usually better clock speeds giving 2%-10% better performance in games.
So to sum up:
The Quadro rules the single-fixed legacy now obsolete rendering pipeline (which CAD uses), but by implementing modern rendering methods this can be significantly reduced (virtually no speed gain in Maya's Viewport 2.0, it uses GLSL effects - very similar to game engine).
Other reasons to get Quadro are double precision float computations for science, better warranty and display's support for professionals.
That's about it, price-vise the Quadros or FirePros are artificially overpriced.