OpenGL Workstation Graphics: Now We're Talking High End!

Manufacturers have never shied away from using superlatives. ATi pits its "Ultra High End" cards FireGL V7350 and V7300 against the honorable Quadro FX 4500 by Nvidia. With these models, both card companies enter the era of graphics cards with a full 1 gigabyte of video memory.

They both perform well, but the Quadro FX 4500 seems to do better in real world applications compared to the FireGLs.

can someone explain to me the REAL difference between these and the standard fare graphics cards?

Some cards can't be flashed up (i.e 6800GS PCI is chip-wise equivalent to a Quadro FX1300/1400) at all, but if you install the Quadro drivers they can sometimes work like a workstation card. RivaTuner can be used with some cards.

The big benefit of workstation cards are 1) Higher vertex performance than the consumer version (benefit negated by anewer + faster consumer cards) and 2) Advanced features (multiple monitors + more texture memory, OpenGL conformance)...

Most 3D apps are only "certified" for use with high-end OpenGL cards. If you are making decent money, $1K isn't a lot to pay for one. For personal projects - a Quadro/FireGL is overkill

So nVidia still rules the roost in OpenGL perf. I'll be interested to see if this level of card will go the coProc route. nVidia has talked about GPU sockets. Though it would only be available on AMD systems, it would definitely be a high margin business.

From TFA

"Microsoft made the political decision to no longer directly support the OpenGL interface - Vista only maps the OpenGL functions using a DirectX emulator, which could mean a considerable loss in performance."

What does this mean for programmers ?

What about people who use Qt's OpenGL classes ?
What about people who write programs in Cg ?

Who / which applications will be affected here ? I am not sure how bad
this news is yet but it sounds bad.

barnaby.

8O

I will be the first to stand up and say I only use XP for one primary purpose: solid modeling in SolidWorks. SolidWorks has never strongly embraced Open GL, which is why I was confused by the use of the Spec Benches in the Tom's Hardware article.

Personally--re the specific use of SolidWorks its no loss to not have it supported by Microsoft in Vista. I don't plan on uggraing for at least a year after the official release next year.

But not everything is apples to apples. Looks like TL needs to revisit the issue and get the scoop on what exactly is going on. This is not necessarily so easy--not your typical product A vs product B bar chart comparison. Seems someone needs to interview the gurus at SolidWorks and Microsoft and find out what's up, not to mention all the other codewriters who implement open GL.

For sure, SolidWorks won't work efficiently on any other platform other than Windows--there is a partnership relationship between MS and SW on that, which is one of the reasons for SolidWorks outstanding growth during the NT-XP years.

The benchmarks used in article are pretty much outdated, that is why the scores look almost identical across the board, and why the Quadro easily holds its own against the FireGLs. There is a discussion about this here:

Lostcircuits Quadro SLi thread

What it boils down to is that the GPU is not the bottleneck, rather the processing power of the machine (or lack thereof) determines how well one scores. Lostcircuits has an article where two Quadro 4500s are run in SLi and on all but one of the benchmarks it is processing speed that is the limiting factor on the score.

TinyClown