Nvidia: Quadro or GTX for AutoCAD?

I want to buy a new laptop (1000$+-) for AutoCAD(4~10 floors buildings), and I have no idea which gpu card to take...
Anyone knows which card should I go for?

 

the Quadro range of cards are designed for CAD stuff while the geforce range is more for gaming.

 

Autocad can use both Quadro and Geforce cards.

I think that even for Autocad particularly, you are better off with a geforce mainly because you can get a high end GPU for much less than a higher end Quadro. Other than that, they should both work.

 

i don't use autocad, but i'm sure it has something to do with opengl/cl and cuda cores and plain gpu power. I use gpu accelerated features in adobe programs and i have a geforce gtx 880m and i've noticed a huge difference between just using a cpu. So for the money, i'd recommend a geforce card, and then you could possibly upgrade it several times to even faster cards as time goes on for the same price as one quadro card.

 

Basic rule for this is what thegh0st said - GTX for gaming, Quadro for anything work related.
That being said, GTX class of GPUs is still capable of running AutoCAD. How complex are your drawings? I had no trouble running 4 A1 size technical drawings on 240m, so I would expect a modern 860m/960m would have even less trouble of doing so. Also, do you plan on gaming. If so, juxt get the GTX card then.

 

2d autocad can be ran fluently on hd3000

So get the one that fits your budget better.

 

AutoCAD use Dx, so you don't really need a quadro. 2d cad will run on anything.

Sent from my 306SH

 

so the only real difference is double-precision floating point on the Quadro. the only Geforce card that has this is the titan series.

 

Indeed... Autocad literally runs on anything... GeForce card is more then enough!

 

AutoCAD on its own ( 2D ) actually does not really care about your GPU, it cares mostly for the speed of the first 2 cores of your CPU unless that changed in 2015 ( im still on 14 )

HOWEVER, certain plugins and things such as revit, Lumion and other software WILL care drastically about such things so you need to put together your software list and see what will utilize what best then make a decision on your needs.

since Im personally quite lazy and value my time though, I always go with a top end Quadro card for two main reasons, you never know when FP64 will show up in a rendering application and most importantly I DESPISE having to re run renders etc because consumer GPU drivers are far, far, far buggier than the certified drivers.

 

I watched some compare videos on Youtube and it seems like gtx has a better fps almost in everytest except "floating 3d mode". I guess GTX 980M would be MUCH better than K2100 (K2100 costs 500$ more than gtx 980m if I'm not wrong)

I think if you go for HUGE works in CAD, like building a new city, you should get nvidia's quadro most powerful card. else, GTX.

 

Not surprising, as it has 3x the shaders (576 vs 1536), double the bus width, and it's Maxwell vs Kepler.

 

AutoCAD is not that demanding, even in the included (crappy) rendering resource, if you are on a budget or don't care about gaming at all then just get an i7 dude, if we were talking about Maya or 3DS Max then it would be another story...

 

I used to believe this as well. However, depending on the specific application, in many cases GeForce cards perform better than Quadro and Firepro, particularly comparing mobile GeForce vs mobile Quadro (i.e., 980M vs K2100M, etc., as WaffleBoy mentioned above).

There are not a lot of benchmarks comparing performance with mobile GeForce and mobile Quadro, but the performance with different cards seems to vary a bit depending on what specific task you are doing.

I don't have any experience using AutoCAD, but it seems for many tasks, the graphics card makes almost no difference at all.

No idea how much this applies for AutoCAD 2015, but for example, 2D tasks with AutoCAD 2013 was almost identical regardless of the GPU:



Gaming cards performed better with Rotate Wireframe tasks than the Quadro cards:


Overall 3D performance was better with GeForce cards compared to much more expensive Quadro and Firepro cards:


Rotate Hidden performance was almost the same regardless of graphics card:

 

I use 2015 edition. On T100 as well.
You and other people who have mentioned it are right - 2D in AutoCAD will run on pretty much anything. Don't know how's 3D, because I only tried it once and I hated it! That is better left to Inventor and the likes.
I did have a crappy performance with Solidedge on 240m. I was doing a part assembly in 3D, and once it started to get bigger, so did the lags. But 240m is old news, a modern GPU like 860m shouldn't have much trouble negotiating 3D in CAD.
It would also help to know what kind of CAD work OP will be doing. Maybe I've missed the part where he mentioned it.
If it will be university grade stuff, GTX will be more than enough. For pro, something more powerful might be needed.

 

I would resptfully disagree with people saying Acad 2d can run on anything. As per my experiance, It all depends on the drawing size and how well it has been made (use of shapes, proxys, blocks e.t.s). Also i find Acad one the most unoptimized pieces of software on the plannet beacuse it use mismash of different technologies and trys to be all encompasing. Each year they include many fancy bells and whistles but the performance becomes worse and worse. To me its unacceptable that a 3rd party viewer is 10 times faster on acad files then acad itself.

In my experiance the biggest factor in configuring an ACAD machine is the CPU speed. Get the fastest clock speed you can get. I would go for fastest 4 core system. Because even though Acad is "mostly" single core, it does have few functions that use multiple core and other core can take care of the load from other running programs.

Regardiing the GPU, acad used to be more open GL in the past but since Acad 2008 they started to change rendering engine and now it is mostly directx. So if you work only of Acad then you can use any card, however if you work with acad it is quite possible to have some other CAD/BIM softwares installed as well. So you may go for a Open GL card. But in any case get a fast GPU, you dont want it to be a bottleneck.

Also get enough ram (32 GB preferable) and if you work on local drive, an SSD is a must. It will help in loading drawing and also reduce the impact of some of the usuall bugs like too long copy paste time.

 

One of the major differences lies in the drivers (though certain things like CUDA cores and whatnot are different too).

QUADRO drivers are certified and typically much more stable.

That being said, unless you're a bonafide professional running your own business, the extra cost of the QUADRO cards doesn't seem to justify the extra performance in pro applications - not to mention the GTX cards will be better for gaming.