Quadro 3000M ... as a gaming card

Sylock

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Sep 20, 2011
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I'm getting a new laptop from work and have little to no input on it's specs. It is coming with a Quadro 3000M card and I am hoping to run games on it :). I'm reading that
1) they are essentially the same cards as GeForce XXXX but with professional certified drivers.
2) they under-perform, in gaming, their GeForce equivalent.

Examples of games coming out that I would like to run: Elder Scrolls Skyrim and Star Wars the Old Republic

So my questions are:
a) Is it true that these will under-perform in gaming situations (especially for the games listed)
b) If they truly are GeForce equivalent chipsets ... could I use a GeForce driver to have them more optimized for gaming?

I am not looking for "Ultra High" graphics, but would like to run a "High" at least.
Thanks for your time.
 

Sylock

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It's equivalent, according to what I am seeing online, is the GeForce FX5900. Some people do some driver mods to get the FX5900 to run the Quadro 3000M drivers.
 
Quadro cards run quite a bit slower in games than the core chipset they are based on. Mostly due to drivers. You'd need to find a hack to run regular drivers on the card to get better performance (if one exists for your card). You can always run 3DMark on the system and compare it to the results from the cards recomended by the game.

I doubt any Quadro in a laptop will be able to run new games on High.
 

Sylock

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Here are some benchmarks that I have found.

3DMark 06
min: 14387 avg: 14387 (56%) max: 14387 Points

3DMark Vantage - P GPU no PhysX 1280x1024
min: 6604 avg: 6604 (23%) max: 6604 Points

So ... with those as the benchmarks, is your opinion the same? This will be 'quite a bit slower' for the new games? Specifically Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and Star Wars the old republic?
 

mavroxur

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You forgot the main difference. Their GPU's are tailored towards precision, not speed. It's not just a drivers difference. While they do share the same silicon as their GeForce counterparts, certain things are enabled and certain things are disabled to increase precision for professional graphics use.
 



I've been seeing this more and more on this forum and this is wrong. While there are hardware differences in geforce vs quadro, the drivers are optimized for the program which helps it perform better/more accurately. The same way geforce drivers can increase game fps by 50%. The card also has other instructions sets that it can use that geforce doesn't have, and again this is a software not hardware. The main difference in hardware is the larger vram and buffer to accommodate larger sets(or res so to speak) of graphics or polys.
 

mavroxur

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That's why I said "it's not just a drivers difference".


That is an inclusive statement. It's not just drivers, it's also a hardware difference.

 

Sylock

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K1114, so am I right in thinking that theoretically I could run a 'more gaming focused driver' for the Quadro 3000M to helps it's benchmarks. Assuming of course those drivers would/could exist.
 
Yes, and I've gamed on a quadro, albeit it was a desktop, it did pretty well vs it's equivalent geforce without messing with the drivers. There's not really an equivalent mgpu as the 460m has 192 cores, 3000m has 240, and the 470 has 288 cores. But with lower clocks, the 3000m would probably perform near a 460m, which is pretty good even if you can't hack the drivers.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-Quadro-3000M.47313.0.html
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-460M.33612.0.html


@mavroxur I some how read hardware was the main difference, my mistake.

A note to everyone that computer components are made for a purpose the same way a car is not designed like a truck.
 

mavroxur

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I'm not saying that you can't game on a Quadro, heck, I even gamed on a Quadro FX1400 for a while back in the day when I was between video cards temporarily. It *worked*, but like you stated, it's hard to haul a load of bricks in your Corvette.


 

nekura

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I have played Skyrim on High w/ 40+ FPS, Portal 2 on Ultra, BF3 Ultra, Assassins Creed Ultra, Witcher 2 Mediumish (only one that gave me problems), and SWTOR on medium-high, but that's beta issues I think and not the system.

I can OC the Core/Shader/Memory and the temp never really changes, fans rarely come on.

Dell Precision M6600
i7 2720QM
Quadro 3000M
16GB Ram
OCZ SSD