Workstation Graphics: 14 FirePro And Quadro Cards

Gentlemen?,

A valiant effort, but in my view, a very important aspect of the comparisons has been neglected, namely, image quality,

It is useful to make quantitative comparisons of workstation cards performing the same tasks, but when gaming / consumer cards are also compared only in terms of speed, the results are not necessarily reflective of these cards' use in content creation. Yes, speed is critical in navigating 3D models- shifting polygons, but the end result of those models is likely to be renderings or animations in which the final quality- refinement of detail and subtlety is more critical than in games.

A fundamental aspect that reflects on the results in this comparison is that the test platform using an i3-3770K is not indicative of a workstation platform for which the workstation cards were designed and the drivers optimized. There are a number of very good reason for Xeons and Opterons and especially, for the existence of dual CPU's with lots of threads. There are other aspects of these components that bear on results, e.g., the memory bandwidth of the i7-3770K is only about half of a Xeon E5-1660. Note too, that that there are good reasons why Xeons have locked multipliers and can not be overclocked- speed is not their measure of success in priority to precision and extreme stability. Also important in this comparison is the presence of ECC RAM which is present in both the system and workstation GPU memory, which was treated a bit lightly, but that is essential for precision, especially in simulations and tasks like financial analysis. Also, ECC affects system speed in it's error correcting duties and parity checks and therefore runs slower than non-ECC. Again, to be truly indicative of workstation cards, it would be more useful to use a workstation to make the comparisons.

An aspect of this report that was not sufficiently clarified, is that the rendering based applications are entirely reflective of CPU performance. Rendering is one of the few tasks that can use all the available system threads and anyone who renders images from 3D models and especially doing animations will today have a dual CPU six or eight core Xeon. I That comparisons were made involving rendering applications on a four-core machine in conditions of which the number of cores / threads matters significantly. believe that some of the dramatic differences in Maya performance in these tests may have been related to the platform used. I have a Previous generation dual four-core system yielding eight cores and sixteen threads at 3.16GHz (Xeon X5460) and during rendering, all eight cores go from 58C to 93C and the RAM (DDR2-667 ECC)from 68C to 85C in about ten minutes.

Also, it's possible that the significant variation in rendering performance then may be due to system throttling and the GPU drivers that are finishing every frame under error-correcting RAM. In this task, the image quality is dependent on precision polygon calculation and i.e, particle placement, such that there are no artifacts, that shadows and color gradients are accurate and refined. Gaming cards emphasize frame rates and are optimized to finish frames more "casually" to achieve higher frame rates. This is why a GTX can't be used for Solidworks modeling either as tasks like structural, thermal, and gas flow simulations must have error correcting memory and Solidworks can produce as much as 128X anti-aliasing where a GTX will produce 16X. When a GTX is pushed in this way, especially on a consumer platform they perform poorly. Again, the image precision and quality aspect was lost in favor of a comparison of speed only.

The introduction of tests involving single and double precision and comments regarding the fundamental differences of priority in the drivers were useful and in my view might have been more extensive as this gets more to the heart of the differences between consumer and workstation cards.

Making quantitative comparisons of image quality is contradictory by definition, but in my view, quality is fundamental to an understanding of these graphics cards. As well, this would assist in explaining to content cobsumers the most important reason content creators are willing to spend $3,500 on a Quadro 6000 when an $800 GTX will make some things faster. Yes, AutoCad 2D is purposely made to run on almost any system- but when the going gets tough***, the tough get a dual Xeon, a pile of ECC, and a Quadro / Firepro!

***(Everything else!)

Cheers, BambiBoom