Of course AutoDesk is only going to support professional line of cards. For each card they certify they have to take their time and hire some people to do it. Not recommending/ certifying gaming graphic cards makes a lot of sense.
That, by no way means that those cards are better or more able, because in fact they aren’t. They aren’t even close to their modern gaming counterparts.
And it speeds it up a lot, trust me, I've set up a CAD lab of computers at my school, with lower stats then my home computer, but they ran AutoCAD faster, reason why being full hardware acceleration. So yes, what I've said is true. The only real difference between Quadros/FireGL and GeForce/Radeon is the driver set they use(the drivers are not interchangeable between them, however) which optimizes the Quadro/FireGL for perfect accuracy(to try to make renderings as accurate as possible) and the GeForce/Radeon for speed a small cost to accuracy(which is not noticeable in games).
I don’t mean to sound rude so forgive me if i do come out as arrogant- but i do have to point out that you just contradicted yourself. You’re just repeating what graphic card manufacturers want you to think.
First you say that quadro/ firegl line has full acceleration, implying that their gaming equivalents somehow lack something. Than you say that professional line has perfect accuracy while gaming cards are sacrificing quality for speed. This is just so not true. Both line of cards ARE certified to run under full API they are certified to run under (4.1 for directx 10.1 and opengl 2.1- full acceleration- hardware certified on both gaming and professional line of cards)
Second, quality of display is selectable on both cards and with both drivers, and if you actually don’t select anything special they are going to have exactly the same quality as the defaults on both card lines and both driver lines have exactly the same defaults.
When you select it to be higher, you can go higher with antialiasing on proffesinal line of cards. Is this hardware specific? Advantage of professional line? No, simple software tweak that many programs can unlock for “free” if the underlying chip is the same. And if you look at:
For nvidia cards
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVIDIA_Quadro
for ati cards:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ATI_Graphics_Processing_Units
You can tell exactly what chip is used where, and if professional card can do it, and your’s cant you can bet your money that simple tweak can unlock it.
That said, on ATI cards you can go as high as todays anti-aliasing(aa) will go- real 24x aa.
As for nvidia, you can unlock 32x aa- but it looks way worse than its own 16qx aa so while the number sounds higher its actually lower in quality. And all geforce cards can do 16qx aa.
In conclusion, same chip at same speed= same card. In reality its like same chip but slower for the professional cards= so they’re actually slower (!) for more money than the gaming card. You could argue that they are more stable, but I challenge you to find an unstable commercially available card- professional or gaming.
As for quality, even though it might seam that professional cards have more potential, you will find that they default to same quality settings, and that the higher setting isn’t always better (32x nvidia)- even if you could use it (which you can even on geforce line with a simple tweak- not that i’d advise it)
And it speeds it up a lot, trust me, I've set up a CAD lab of computers at my school, with lower stats then my home computer, but they ran AutoCAD faster, reason why being full hardware acceleration.
Can I ask what cards did the school use and what graphic card did you try at home? Unless it was in openGL id doubt that ANY professional card could come close to a current 100$+ gaming card in performance. And even in openGL the gaming card would really have to be bad to lose - noticeably.
(and i'm not being rude here, you can buy 512mb hd3850 card for ~100$- that one is miles faster than ANY quadro card awailable today- yes even the quadro fx 5600)
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