delaro said:
Here read this it explains things a little better.
Workstation Cards vs Gaming
http://www.adris.co.uk/hardware/cad-workstation-guide/w...
Xeon W vs I7
http://www.adris.co.uk/hardware/cad-workstation-guide/x...
Consumer graphics cards benefit from DirectX optimizations, Autodesk is unique in they take advantage of this. AMD's Radeon R9 290X holds its own in 3d rendering but the results are not always the same. There is a bit of a stability issue to be concerned about with consumer level drivers in business oriented rendering. Lets look at it this way do you want to pay 10K for a Autodesk license and loss 100 hours of work due to a IT guy installing a piece of $500 piece of hardware that May or May not work 100% of the time. Do yourself a favor and invest in what is approved by your license and eliminate the "???????" factor because in business rendering you want 100% assurance.
thanks for confirming and reiterating what I thought about the whole thing. Autodesk doesn't have approved and certified GPUs and respective drivers for no reason but when I brought up Quadro cards, 'IT' guy brushed me off in a very obvious 'I don't actually know what that is but theres no way I'm admitting that to you' kind of way. As only a medium sized surveying firm the short term benefits of overhead cost cutting are always appealing. Hence the quotation marks around 'IT' through the thread.