Quadro vs. Geforce for Maya and Gaming

I have a friend who is building a new system soon based on a q6600 now that the prices have started to drop. He wants to be able to play games, but his job involves graphics design and he needs to be able to run Maya and other 3d applications well.

I've been telling him to get an 8800GTS or GTX, since that's the classic answer for a system that needs to do both 3d work and gaming, but he really thinks that the Quadro is what he needs for his work, and that he'll just make do with whatever gaming performance he can get out of it.

So I looked around for benchmarks that might show how well each card would do at the job they weren't really designed for - The quadro for gaming, and the geforce for Maya. The problem is that Tom's charts only show the benchmarks that you would expect - 3d application benchmarks for the Quadro's and game benchmarks for the geforce.

So I guess my question is - does anyone have any experience running these cards or know of any benchmarks that compare them on equal terms. And what would you recommend for someone who primarily wants to do 3d work, but also likes the occasional game?

Thanks a lot.

well from his post its clear he already knows that. what he's asking is how will a Quadro perform with games, and unfortunately i dont know the answer either

get your mate an 8800gtx, get him to do this http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversi [...] 37552.html to it

I have only this small bit of information. My school just got a bunch of double quads with quadro fx 3700 cards. While we use them primarily for maya, they are also used to run unreal. They seem to work fine. I haven't used URT myself since the upgrade, so I haven't noticed any subtle performance differences, and had pretty much gotten used to Unreal taking a while to load. What I have noticed, and am trying to resolve is, Maya 2008 seems to "hang up" when closing. I'm trying to figure out why it has a lag. It may be no one has gone into the settings for the nvidea cards to optimize them for maya. when i worked in unreal, i was always having to go in and reset from maya on my pc at home.

I have a Quadro in a machine. The series I have is internally identical to a 8600 GT.
Software wise, bios and drivers is where things get a bit different.
Keep in mind that the drivers for the Quadro's are optimized and designed for CAD and 3d applications and not games. I have played Quake 4 with the Quadro card on my Linux machine, but not with out random chopiness and artifacting.

Not always.
Optimizations do have a great impact in some applications, one that raw power doesn't make up for, and where you see an otherwise monsterously powerful card, just struggle.

http://hothardware.com/Articles/Nv [...] MB/?page=7

The best option, Soft moding Geforces and Radeons to Quadros and FireGLs. You get the gaming performance when you want it, and the workstation performance when you want it, all for gaming/consumer prices.

It's pretty easy for Geforces (FireGLs are trickier, and IMO only worth it if you know the FireGL is significantly faster than the Quadro equaivalent);
http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=539

Just don't use this for jobs that require certified workstations cards from ISV, IHV or contract. But for pro-sumers dabbling at home and such you get near 9x% of a Quadro for usually 25% (or less) of the price.

from what I found out, is that the 8800gtx and the quadro that looks just like it are the exact same cards. That is was simply "designed for 3D applications" and therefor is so much different.

Big software companies dont care about a single 4K card, they buy them in racks (whatever they're called) and upgrade each 6 months or so. The price is calculated in the product they deliver to their customers.

Still, none of my 3D programs including maya ever used my 8800gtx. It helped in modeling itself, but the rendering would still be done by the CPU........