QUADRO VS GTX

Will you be gaming at all?

No this is just work machine , gaming is not the purpose

Then Quadro all the way.

If you only work then Quadro straight. Or Firepro.

Quadro is the best you can get for that sort of thing. They are more specifically designed for your purpose.

Think of it this way. This is my analogy for many things.
You right now could go out and buy a Toyota Corolla at the moment and take it to a racetrack. Given it is brand new and works flawlessly, you won't find yourself winning to many races. With the same amount of money that it costs to buy a new Corolla though, you can buy a purpose-built DIY track car and find yourself winning more races.

The point of that analogy is that you are going to get much more done with something more purpose built, something made to do a specific task.

Here is a video pretty much explaining the difference.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4CoFyMaBVA

The Quadro is designed just for the work that you described.
Most other video cards are tuned for different kinds of work, like gaming for example, and won't perform as well for your application.

ok- this is what i know - Quadro cards work best when it comes to open GL solutions , hoever with recent trends of DX being used in most 3Ds projects , The ability of the new GTX cards is very close to quadros , now i am not saying GTX would beat a quadro but in my opinion as these gaming cards are designed to cater DX intense games it might be as useful for 3ds , now if i wanted a simple gpu rendering machine would i still go with quadro?
I mean its price for performance I can buy a 1500$ quadro or I can buy 2 580s for that price and put in two rigs ( ignore the cost of computer as I already have the machines just buying GPUs ) .

TESLA cards are another story which would make things crazier, I need practical examples or results from experience that proves quadros are worth the price!

Again , I agree quadros are better in terms of performance but , its about getting most for the same amount of money.

I also work with 3ds max and recently upgraded to an EVGA GTX 580 3GB card. My reasoning behind this choice is that I want to design game characters/objects in Max, and also be able to test my rigged models in the game environment itself. With this card I get decent performance in both. It comes down to what you want to do with it. If you need to do prolonged GPU accelerated renders then quadros would be better because they have custom cooling. You could also try searching for an answer on the Autodesk Area forums, lots of people have had the same dilemma. Good luck!

Trist_58 have you used quadros ? do you Prefer GPU rendering over CPU?

Now as I understand the difference the newer quadros and GTX cards have the same graphics chip in them, the difference is that the quadros have a bunch more RAM, as well as error correction, and can calculate to a higher degree of accuracy (more bits per number). They also keep cooler so that they are less likely to burn up while doing a rendering run than a GTX card.
It also depends on what type of rendering you are doing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jD1hJJsqCms&feature=fvwp...
This video shows the difference between a 512MB 8800GTX vs a 2GB Quadro 4000 rendering something in an old version of After Effects. Hardly seems fair to compare the 2 cards as the Quadro clearly outclasses the 8800, but while using one renderer the Quadro is 2x as fast, the 8800GTX is actuially faster than the quadro when rendering in openGL.

My point is that there is not much information available about which is 'better' these days. There use to be a clear distinction between the 2 GPU lines, but it has been blurred a lot over the last few years. It would be nice if Tom's did a review of the GTX, Quadro, Radeon, and Fire Pro cards to separate the myth from reality.

I know from my own use of Premiere that I have been quite happy with the CUDA rendering within the Mercury Playback Engine, but then again I was coming from an old Core2Duo 4GB ram, paired with a 9800GT and Premiere Pro 1.5, so it was a fairly massive upgrade for me.

CaedenV - I totally agree with you , I was inclined to render farm solutions but it is just way better to have fever high end Workstations thn managing render farms - I see no option but to take the jump and buy 580 and Quadroo 2000 or 5000 and benchmark on different platforms - but again the reason u cannot be sure is the level of complexity , CPU , RAM and so on and so forth . I have looked into EVGA classified 580 with 3 GB due to the fact you mentioned - higher RAM.
Cards like 590 offer tremendous performance but they are limited due to application restricting use of SLI configuration.!

a very good quadro card will kill games on ultra setting i asure you my friend has 512mb quadro of fx 3000 series and he can play any game on it on high settings and your main purpose is work so quadro will do both for you ......and plz guys dont say that quadro sucks in gaming my personal experince with quadro's is very good

ashrafi,

I have never used quadros with my work. Personally, I prefer CPU rendering (mental ray) over GPU rendering (iray) for final production - the quality is soo much better and I think you'll find most of the industry will agree with me  

btw: so far I have barely touched my 3gb of vram in Max. The fact is your cpu will bottleneck your card far before you reach it's limit, be it a quadro or gtx.

Hope this helps.

Not that the OP wants to use his rig for gaming, but 512mb vram is not enough to play modern games. Skyrim eats up heaps more than that. Also not enough for the intended purpose - 3D design and rendering.

After 3 days of testing and investment to get answers , I bought GTX 560 Ti with 448 cores and Asus GtX 580 with 1.5GB Vram ,
Did several tests , I also had an older Quadro 4800 , 460 , 560 , 560Ti ,580 for Tests.
The newer cards are bang for buck , I am really impressed with 560Ti 448 cores.

I dont think I would be buying newer quadros unless I NEED them.

Regarding Gpu Acceleration ( not Gpu rendering which had me confused ) , I am using Viewport2.0 which utilizes GPU and having better GPU means better quality.


Secondly the VRam or GPU ram for AfterEffect should have benefit on the amount of rendered frames and complexity.( i am not sure how or If the render times increase with higher VRAM).

Sooo...which GTX did you end up keeping? You say that you bought both 560Ti and 580 but these two cannot be used in SLI so I don't see the logic...or have you got two rigs?

Anyway, it's good you found what you were looking for  

Ye For different Rigs .