'Professional' vs. 'Gaming' cards...?

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8Complex

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 15, 2003
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272
Hey all -

I'm in a bit of a delimma and haven't been able to find a test putting the two types of cards up against each other. I do am about to do a lot of side work at home with the program SolidWorks, which is pretty heavily OpenGL dependant. It would be a no-brainer if I hadn't had such horrible gaming performance the last time I bought a professional card... and only a slight difference in work use when I switched to a gaming card.

The two cards that are up against each other in my book right now are the Geforce 5900 Ultra vs. the FireGL T2. Both are 128MB cards, both are around the same price range. The machine either are destined to be in will be an A64 3200+ on an Asus K8V Deluxe and 1GB of Mushkin level 2 memory.

So has there been any tests of the kind and my searching skills need a dusting off, or is this a pretty unique inquiry?
 
I'm definately no expert but i believe there is a way to boost CAD performance on Gaming cards with something like a driver change. I'm thinking that would give you good gaming performance and 'ok' CAD performance. But from my experience its almost 2 different sides of the tracks.

Keep in mind tho, say your gaming is excellent. This probably means your CAD is going to be more than fine but not what it coulda been with a dedicated CAD card. Personally i would look into the ATI CAD card or one of the Quadro's. NVIDIA's Quadro line are probably one of the best price/performance CAD cards out. We've been getting nothing but the Quadro FX 500's here at work. This is a low end line Quadro. But the ATI card would give you good CAD performance and the way ATI makes their chips it would give you good game performance also.

Just my 2 cents:rolleyes:
(definately not an expert):D
 
it seems to run pretty well on my computer with a geforceti4200, so i'm sure the 5950 would be fine.
 
If you CAD is going to consist of wireframes or lines, and not "on the fly rendering", any of the two cards would be just fine. The reason it's referred to as a professional card is because the drivers have been certified by either AutoDesk, SolidWorks, Parametrics...etc, and the GPU is configured to render vertices a bit differently.
 
All good info.


Mojo JoJo - I've seen drivers cause some visual blemishes in shaded mode, perhaps that is what you're referring to with the vertice rendering. Usually it consists of a missing side, making the part hollow by not redering one side of it. I've also see the screen just black out until you actually move the window off-screen and back, which was the wierdest one. IIRC, that was on a TNT2 card, that rather sucked.

I think if fugu's geforceti4200 works well, I would assume that the family of processors have the same driver writers, and more then likely would have similar problems (of which he says he has none).
 
OK. here's the deal.

short version, given a choice between the 5900 and the firegl x1 for an OGL app/gaming compromise, get the 5900 and save some cash and play your games. The firegl is drastically undersupported by ati when you are talking games, and somewhat undersupported by them when discussing 3d apps (although it being towards the end of the product cycle you would get to miss out on 90% of those growing pains).


explanation of why:

Quadro 3000 is basically a 5900U with some fiddling done and specialized drivers in addition to the unified driver they share.

The only real difference between them is that a couple features in the unified driver are available to the quadro and not to the consumer core. namely anti-aliased wireframes. THe other difference is the ability to run the maxtreme driver in 3ds MAX and the equivalent for autocad.

To the best of my knowledge, solidworks will just run openGL and there is no specialized driver for the app itself. The openGL implimentation for the quadro and the 5900U is essentially the same, and quite good. the quadro will be faster because of the tweaks, but the quality will be equivalent.


As for the fireGL, hardware wise it is basically a radeon 9700 with some fiddling done with it and a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT set of drivers than the radeon for EVERYTHING. IT also has specialized drivers for max and autocad. But once again solidworks will be using straight up openGL performance. However, the openGL implimentation for the fireGL is different than the radeon. It's decent, and much better than the radeons implimentation (yes gamer folks, shut up right now with the "radeon's openGL is flawless" crap. it is fixed very well for games, but it is NOT a compelte implimentation of the spec and does certain things you won't run into in games BADLY, I have one and it's slow and nasty in OGL apps), but still not as solid as the nvidia OGL implimentaion when it comes to quality of all the OGL extensions as a whole. ATI's specialized max drivers are not very good either.
 
Vendors have been known to cripple line drawing performance of the gaming cards so as not to eat into their pro level cards. FireGL and Quaddro vs their gaming equivalents come to mind . . .
 
raz-0 - You seem to know a lot on the topic, is there any chance of running the Quadro drivers/firmware with the 5900U? Or are the hardware tweaks too extensive?

Great news on the T2 vs. 9700, though. I had a feeling FireGL wasn't what it used to be back when I originally bought my Diamond Multimedia FireGL Pro 1000 card, and that just proves it.

I think even if the 5900U is slightly slower then the Q3000, then it's not such a large deal since the Q3000 pretty much owns the rest of the professional market right now. Even if it's 10% slower, it's still faster then the Quadro FX 500, according to Tom's Hardware's tests.
 
softquadro doesn't really exist for the FX series. mainly because the guy who makes the softquadro stuff doesn't have a very high opinion of the card.

If you are really motivated, you can make the softquadro scripts and patches work, but only with pre-forceware drivers. Which limits the gaming aspect.

I had a 5800 ultra for a while, and benchmark-wise, it's OGL performance was reasonably close to the fireGL x1 with the exception of wireframe performance.

Some of the early sample 5800 ultras were actually free of the hardware modification that cripples the quadro features and you could jsut install the quadro drivers without any issues. But they are rare.

PErsonally, look at your budget, and how much wireframes perfomance means to you.

For myself, if I needed top notch OGL and my budget was capped at the $500 mark, I'd probably just go with a fx5900 of some flavor.

If wireframes meant a lot, I'd go with the fireGL X1. (I believe they FINALLLY have DX9 drivers, which was a major show stopper for quite a while IMO).
 
I do a lot more with rendered 3d components then I do in wireframe. I only switch to wireframe when I need to find something that is buried in an assembly.

My budget is nearer the $300 range, so I guess I'll definitely be going with the 5900U. Thanks again. :)
 
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