Any way to combine quadfx/CAD with a gaming card?

Hey Global,

Unfortunately as far as I know the workstation cards and gaming cards are fairly exclusive to each other. I'm not sure that there's an effective way to get the best of both worlds. You can't SLi or Crossfire two different cards, and swapping out cards constantly doesn't make sense.

Anyone have any advice here?

Hi

I recently had exactly the same dilemma, and someone kindly pointed out this article to me http://www.cgarchitect.com/news/newsfeed.asp?nid=4960. Have a read through.

I ultimately decided that the high-end gaming card is the way to go as it is constantly up there with the workstation cards on these kinds of apps, apart from a couple of stand out instances in increased performance with the workstation card. However these come at a much higher price which I didn't seem worthwhile, you'd have to get the very highest end workstation card in order to see a really noticeable increase in CAD performance, which here in New Zealand comes to a price difference of $700NZD to $5000NZD.

Also worthwhile noting that your gaming will be useless with any workstation card.

I have to agree with Rikishi, I don't have very much knoweldge, but I know I can do heavy CAD/ Effects/Photoshop on my 260s and I havn't see anything too slow. (You may do much heavier CAD than I've ever tackled, I just used it for collage classes).

Obviously if your in the buisness and doing work where you NEED the high end $2000 and up workstation cards your probably should have two computers.

^^ Agreed, only way around this issue if you really need the highest end workstation cards but still want to do gaming is to get two seperate systems. One set-up specifically for gaming the other for CAD.

This is what I am eventually going to do down the track if I ever get obscene amounts of spare cash lying around for a high-end 3D/CAD set-up.

Nvidia cards is better in this type of need. I get excellent performance from my GTX 280C running my Mathlab code than on my pc with 4890. Somehow i can't set Mathlab to use 4890 processor.

Nvidia is supported by CAD/CAE tool makers to use the GPU for math intensive applications. Nvidia has wide support for math intensive tools and CAD/CAE tools.


I'm waiting for Nvidia to get all 512 cores running on the Fermi chip. Then i will get one. In that way i have a very good gaming machine then reasonable workstation performance GPU. I use it for circuit simulation.

I new a lot of people SLI nvidia cards for engineering or cad use against spending money on workstation card.

Workstation card is still faster by a big margin but still too expensive.