Quadro is...what exactly?

Forgive my n00b question...

What is the big difference between Quadro and GeForce? I know Quadro is geared towards business applications. Does that mean since it is optimized for CAD / editing it can't play games??

Also, on Lenovo's site is says some of the Quadro cards have 96 cores or more. This isn't like a processor core, is it? 96???

 

Quadro cards are actually exactly the same as Geforce cards, at least prior to 6000 series, after that nVidia lasered off some components from Geforce cards to have some difference between them so that Geforce cards could not be completely softmodded into Quadro cards.

Basically, if you ignore those few shaders, and probably some pipelines, a Quadro is basically a Geforce with specialized openGL drivers that nVidia work with CAD software developers to make them almost perfectly compatible.

There's a smaller market for these cards, so basically the massive cost over the Geforce cards is the cost of development of the drivers that is shouldered by the buyers, Geforce cards have tons of buyers to shoulder the same driver development cost, but quadro users are few, so they shoulder a much higher cost.

 

Quadro is nVidia's workstation series of graphics cards, GeForce is their gaming series. Most of the differences lie in the drivers; for the most part the actual cards are physically identical, although the Quadro series models sometimes have significantly more memory (i.e. 4GB for a Quadro card while a GeForce might have 1GB).

And these "processors" aren't the same thing like you would think of in terms of a CPU.

 

Understood. I was just trying to understand why these cards demand a $1000+ premium over their gaming counterparts. I am going to be working with many basic editing programs like fireworks and photoshop, as well as web design software, but definitely no CAD. Sure doesn't sound worth it (at least, not for my use).

 

biggest difference, the quadros will pretty much half your render time in things such as Maya and come specialty CAD/CAM applications, and speed up some other photo and video editing apps with their optimized openGL drivers. and they game almost on par with their GF counterparts.

okay that and the extra expense of having one

 

You don't need it. Quadros have certain execution paths commonly used by CAD and high-end 3D software (Maya, 3DStudio, etc.) that are accelerated significantly over what they are in the consumer-level cards by having parts of the chip that are specific to those common operations. That is the only difference between them and the consumer level cards.

The difference in price is because that performance is worth it to many business users. The only thing you might see a bit of a performance boost in is Photoshop, but it doesn't sound like you're doing a ton of RAW processing or anything like that, so you won't likely see any real difference. You'll get much more value by going with a consumer-level card.

 

Awesome, thanks Pitabred!

 

Mmm... for what you're doing, I don't think there's any hardware acceleration from the GPU anyway, so your CPU would be doing the work.

 

Gotcha, thanks for all the help.

 

Yup , the quadro is really not worth it.. any gaming card should do ur tasks quite well...

 

I've heard of people using Geforce drivers with the quadro cards, how does that affect gaming performance? How would it affect CAD?

 

you used to be able to softmod a GF to act as a quadro but no longer as Nvidia actually disables that section of the GPU die on the chip now.

no matter how you look at it the Quadros will perform roughly the same in gaming and beat the crap out of the GForce card in OpenGL optimized applications especially rendering apps like Maya.

In A-CAD it depends on the plugins and types of renders you do, you can see a small improvement with the quadro all the way to a 250% increase in the case of my wifes kitchen design CAD app.