Nvidia Takes Fermi to Entry-Level Professionals
Fermi for work.
Nvidia's Fermi transformation is nearly complete, as this week it is expanding to both retail shelves and now into the entry-level professional space.
The company debuted two new Quadro products based on Fermi – the mid-range Quadro 2000 with 192 CUDA processing cores and the entry-level Quadro 600 with 96 CUDA processor cores.
Nvidia says that the Quadro 2000 delivers 1.5 times the geometry performance of the previous Quadro GPU in the mid-range. Helping the performance boost is Scalable Geometry Engine technology that helps CAD and DCC applications such as SolidWorks and Autodesk 3ds Max.
At a considerably lower cost, the Quadro 600 is a half height, energy efficient card that'll accelerate Autodesk AutoCAD 2011 to handle models that are twice the size and complexity compared to the previous entry-level card.
Both the Quadro 2000 and Quadro 600 feature 1GB of graphics memory and are compatible with the new 3D Vision Pro active shutter-glasses solution, providing the option for the third-dimension, or Avatar.
Since both cards will be used in work settings, both the Quadro 2000 and Quadro 600 feature an "ultra-quiet" design.
The Quadro 2000 is priced at $599 and Quadro 600 is at $199, both available now.


I wouldn't expect the comparrison to go in Nvidia's favor. Otherwise this advertisement article would have made sure to point that out.
I agree this article is an advertisement. That said, in the professional graphics arena, drivers are king. I would not be surprised to see AMD parts with much better theoretical performance get beaten in the real world by these nvidia parts. It may be purely for historical reasons, but give credit where credit is due: nvidia generally has good driver optimizations for many applications, and these optimized drivers often best AMD's offerings.
I would also like to see a solidworks shoot out. If you dont have a test maybe something like this one: http://www.solidmuse.com/solidworks-benchmark-scoobydoo-surface-model.html
Help us poor people stuck with IT built rigs who think any run of the mill card can handle solidworks!!! Let alone the p4 im still forced to use... Damn IT dept.
Yeah, at least I managed to salvage a rig with a dual-core. Boo to the bad small-business IT deptartments!
Tom's hasn't done a Workstation Chart since 2007, if their search engine is working right. Back then, the FX 570 were beating out top of the line FireGl cards costing 10 times as much in Solidworks benchmarks. As Anna and everyone else on the Solidworks forums says, it's all about CPU. Get the fastest processor you can get, which is Core i7, fast memory, and a good hard drive. Don't blow more than 500 on the video card, and 200 is really enough unless you do a lot of rendering and presentation stuff. I'm using a Dell M6400 notebook. About two years old, Core 2 extreme worth every penny, and FX2700m graphics card. My co-worker opted for the quad core and the 3700m, and his is considerably slower than mine in everything solidworks. He is a modeling and sim guy so he got the right combo for what he normally does with it. I know a lot has changed, and AMD has done some catching up, but Nvidia still leads in drivers.
Regardless, ATI stream blows. Go look at folding at home, Nvidia crushes AMD when it comes to parallel performance.
I bet you work for nvidia.
Of course there still remains the problem that except for UG (as far as I know) no solid modelers are multithreaded for the core modeling and assembly environments. This makes the software very CPU limited. So I'd like to see benchmarks with an i5-680 and workstation versus gaming cards. Inventor uses Direct3D, but I've seen mixed results. For example with an E8400 these cards provide identical performance: 8800GTS 640MB, HD5850 1GB,m HD5870 2GB. Although with the 5850 and 5870 in CF, there was a performance improvement. My benchmarking assembly has 7000 parts.
And i bet every ATI fan boy bashing on nvidia works for AMD right!?!
Drivers/small hardware change. Still have not found a GREAT article or anything that explains it, but in general, it is the drivers, and a small hardware change that some people can imitate by "soft-modding" a gaming GPU. All in all, gaming GPUS do not do well in applications that workstation GPUs excel at, and vice versa. Different beasts. high rpm-low torque vs. low rpm-high torque (possible analogy?)
I thought AMD does not support CUDA? So how can you compare -- unless we are talking OpenCL.
However, when weighing the cards to use for a workstation you should always do research. The best card will flip flop depending on application. For instance if you are going to use Autodesk Maya, you will be using an AMD. AMDs just do significantly better here and you would be wasting money using nVidia. For more entry-level applications, chances are you will want the lower watt card over the cheaper card. You would just hope the better card is also the cheaper card.
http://www.slashgear.com/nvidia-quadro-2000-and-quadro-600-fermi-pro-video-cards-unveiled-05106033/
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3961/nvidia-launches-quadro-2000-600