What about using Quadro for games?

[grafixmonkey]

I'm building either one or two computers for myself soon.

One of them will be an absolute <i>all out</i> video and 3D graphics workstation, because I'm doing that stuff as a profession. It will have a 240GB 4-stripe RAID-0, a 266GB 4-disk RAID-5, with the RAID card on a 64-bit PCI-X slot, dual Xeons, and 1GB ram.

The other was going to be a gaming machine, but then I realized, that workstation would be really nice for games too if it had a card that could play games. I currently have a Quadro4 750xgl, and it can play games like UT2003 pretty well, but Prince of Persia Sands of Time, Halo, and Deus Ex Invisible War all have to be run at 640x480.

So... I'm considering upgrading to the latest QuadroFX or FireGL card instead of building a gaming machine, because then I can take advantage of the RAID and memory and fast processor for games (yeah I know dual procs won't help much for games but a single Xeon would still be real good), without having to buy all that for a new system. Getting the new pro card would be about the same cost as building a new system, and would benefit my 3D work a lot. I could also sell the Quadro4 I have for as much as $300.

<b>The big question:</b> Anybody here use a QuadroFX for games, or know of any game benchmarks for it? If it even approaches the speed of an FX5800 or FX5900-XT, it would be a good upgrade, especially since that would allow me to wait for PCI-Express to come out and mature for a few months, and then buy the next generation card.

 

[pIII_Man]

Honestly you probably will get better performance or at least the same performance in games with just a single 800mhz fsb pentium 4, but still other apps might run slower.

Anyhow to answer your question Quadros and even ati's Fire line of cards are all based on equivilent main stream/gamers GPUs, you can even convert your R300 card into a fire GL. So basically the performance will be very much the same, however the price of getting a top of the line quadro is a lot more than a 5900 or a 9800xt.


If it isn't a P6 then it isn't a procesor
110% BX fanboy

 

[lik]

The drivers for Quadro and Fire cards are not designed for games. The performance will not be very good I think. But try see wath the GREATAPE say's or someone with more experience than me.

P4-2800->FSB800, Asus P4P800, 512DDR-400, Radeon 9800 Pro - 128Mb

 

[grafixmonkey]

here's my experience with Pro cards vs. game cards:

Pro cards perform far less than their equivalent game cards in games, because they are optimized for lots of simply shaded polygons and don't have good fill rate.

Pro cards have hardware support for lots of important stuff that comes up in 3D applications but never comes up in games. (hardware XOR compositing, many complexly overlapping clipping planes, mega hardcore wireframe drawing, hardware acceleration of the entire OpenGL pipeline instead of just the polygon-drawing part, lots of stuff.)

I <b>need</b> a Pro card for my 3D applications, many operations that were twitchy slow and not doable on my previous gaming card were ultra smooth on the Quadro. I need a 64-bit 66mhz pci slot for my raid, I need the raid for video editing and data security, and only Xeon and Opteron boards have 64-bit slots.

What I want to know is, will I be able to play Doom 3, Deus Ex Invisible War, Halo, and Half Life 2 pretty well at 1024x768 on a QuadroFX 3000? That is the card I would buy in place of building a gaming system, if I decide to take that route. If a QuadroFX 3000 won't play all those modern DX9 games well, then I will keep my Quadro4 750xgl and build a separate gaming system.

I do work in dual-screen so I'm not sure if a FireGL card would work or not. If I use the built-in windows split screen, then OpenGL apps that start on one screen will not update if they are placed on the other.

 

[coylter]

if i remember the 3000 is the fx5900 but with a proffesionnal bios. So it should play those game well but you would gain performance with a gamer bios .

Athlon 2700xp+ (oc: 3200xp+ with 200fsb) , Radeon 9800pro (oc: 410/370) , 512mb pc3200 (3-3-3-2), Asus A7N8X-X

 

[grafixmonkey]

That's an interesting idea... I was under the impression that the Quadro cards and Geforce cards had different graphics cores, ever since the Geforce/Quadro 4's. So the difference is more like a card BIOS flash?

Has anyone <b>seen any game benchmarks</b> run on Pro cards? Everybody seems to only run application and 3D Studio Max benchmarks on them. A 3DMark score set would do also, I can guess on the cards performance based on the individual scores in each section.

If that Quadro FX 3000 would hold out on games for a year or so, it would be a worthwhile purchase, because my current card is <i>sufficient</i> but still slows down in complex scenes if I don't spend time making scene layers to reduce the number of objects displaying at once.