When it comes to gaming-oriented graphics cards, Nvidia's GeForce dominates the Radeon. The opposite is true when we isolate the workstation products, though. AMD's FirePro beats the more expensive Quadro K5000 again, and the FirePro W5000 leaves Nvidia's Quadro K2000 in the dust. Of course, none of the other professional boards can touch Nvidia's Quadro K6000, though at $5000, it's as expensive as it is rare.
In theory, you could probably get by with a GeForce or Radeon card in Maya 2013, so long as the potential for lower color depth doesn't bother you. If you're willing to sacrifice SSAO and MSAA, there's also the option of falling back to an older workstation-class card (unless you're working with extremely large models).

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Summary
- Introducing Our Benchmark System
- CATIA V6 R2012
- Results: CATIA V6 R2012
- Creo 2
- Results: Creo 2
- Energy
- Results: Energy
- Maya 2013
- Results: Maya 2013
- Medical
- Results: Medical
- Showcase 2013
- Results: Showcase 2013
- Siemens NX 8.0
- Results: Siemens NX 8.0
- SolidWorks 2013
- Results: SolidWorks 2013
- CPU Scaling
- Image Quality And Desktop Drivers
- SPECviewperf 12: A Much-Needed And Welcome Update
Ask a Category Expert
When AMD releases the mighty 16GB FirePro 9100 based on Radeon R9-290X core will be competitive to the Quadro K6000 in performance.
I find that internal benchmarking the only way to really understand the value of workstation cards. W7000 for example - it was awesome in our internal testing. While good, the cards is much better than these benchmark results suggest. Not sure why I would look at another SPEC benchmark when I will still need to test the cards in-house to really know how good they are for our applications and models.
Unfortunately, testing in the real applications (using something like APCapc) requires actual licenses of the software apps. Many of these vendors (CATIA, NX, etc) simply don't make temp licenses available for reviewers/journalists or other non-users.
VP12 should be quite good enough to help make informed evaluations of GPU hardware. If you are concerned about seeing in-application performance measurements for particular apps, you can ususually find the data with a bit of googling, although take results you find posted on the internet by "regular Joe's" with a grain of salt.
Adam Glick
Sapphire Technologies
tsk tsk tsk
About CPU Scaling: "In the second set of our scaling results, only SolidWorks responds to CPU frequency. Core and thread count don't make a difference.ยจ
This is not entirely true. It goes as far as 10% at 4.5 GHz.
I find that internal benchmarking the only way to really understand the value of workstation cards. W7000 for example - it was awesome in our internal testing. While good, the cards is much better than these benchmark results suggest. Not sure why I would look at another SPEC benchmark when I will still need to test the cards in-house to really know how good they are for our applications and models.
tsk tsk tsk
It is so problematic to read the posts above too? I wrote:
And for your information: AMD (Sapphire included) was not able to send me a R9 295X2 to my lab here in Germany! So I had to wait for Chris' card (yes, we've paid 550 bucks only for FedEx Priority from U.S. to Germany) and I was so lucky to handle two launch articles at the same time. The day has 24 hrs only, sorry for my laziness.
You get the complete W9100 story (the updated SPECviewperf12 is only a part of this) on 17 pages, don't worry, but it must be translated first.
Titan is good for compute, the SPECviewperf12 is more graphics related. No chance for consumer cards.
"Don't bother with anything else because Nvidia K6000 is the fastest."
You see the results of the consumer cards inside? The Titan is a little bit slower than the tested GTX 780 Ti, the Titan Black is in such cases 2-3% faster. But both are slower than a 780 Ti OC and the results of this card are in the most cases absolutelly worthles. I've tested the consumer cards belong the workstion graphics only for demonstration purposes.
But it really makes no sense to run pro-apps with non-certified hardware and drivers!
A better question is this. The 780 TI OC is faster than a titan black? And are these tests with the normal 780 TI driver? If so for working not he road a 780 ti rig will do the job.