How Well Do Workstation Graphics Cards Play Games?

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We all know that gaming and workstation graphics cards employ the same hardware, differentiated by slight tweaks, drivers, and validation. We also know desktop cards usually perform awfully in professional apps. Does the reverse hold true as well?

Results: 3DMark 11

3DMark 11

This isn't a title you can play, but it may help serve as a predictor of performance for titles unaffected by AMD's or Nvidia's marketing programs, which often emphasize vendor-specific features. I recommend keeping these numbers in mind for later. You'll find that they show 3DMark 11 as a decent benchmark of a graphics card's theoretical performance, since both companies optimize their drivers for it, even if it isn't representative of any real-world game.

Surprisingly, the AMD FirePro W7000 beats the W8000. The other numbers end up where we'd expect them to. But the results get more interesting on the next page as we look at another synthetic benchmark and one graphics card that posts surprising numbers.

Igor Wallossek
90 Comments Comment from the forums
  • MyUsername2
    Are these cards so expensive because fewer people need to buy them, or do they really have that much more tech in them?
    Reply
  • ipwn3r456
    Umm, why not the newest Quadro K5000 is being benchmarked, but the newest FirePro W9000 is being tested here?
    Reply
  • velocityg4
    MyUsername2Are these cards so expensive because fewer people need to buy them, or do they really have that much more tech in them?Probably the former plus they can get away with charging more as business customers need them.

    Same with Enterprise hard drives. They are pretty much the same as regular hard drives. The only real difference is how they deal with data errors. The consumer drive will try to correct the error and recover the data causing the drive to not respond for a while and the RAID controller to thing it went bad potentially taking down the array when trying to rebuild. An Enterprise drive just notes the error and keeps chugging along asking the array for the corrupted data.

    Now while the Enterprise hard drive is little more than a firmware change, making their price appalling. At least these workstation cards actually have some different chips and design requiring their own manufacturing equipment. So their higher price is more justified as they have to make changes to their line for a relatively small number of cards.

    If they had a demand as high as the gaming cards their prices would probably be pretty close to their gaming counterpart. I'm sort of surprised one of them hasn't just unified their gaming and workstation line and dominate the workstation market.
    Reply
  • k1114
    Best article topic I've seen all year.
    Reply
  • FormatC
    Umm, why not the newest Quadro K5000 is being benchmarked, but the newest FirePro W9000 is being tested here?
    Ask Nvidia and take a look in the NDA- Try to buy one ;)

    Reply
  • anxiousinfusion
    So its Toms suggesting that enthusiasts who want bleeding edge performance start building gaming machines with the W9000 cards?
    Reply
  • moneymoneymoney
    @anxiousinfusion I would say that they're saying if you want professional performance in CAD & 3D Rendering software but also game on the same machine then these cards can do just that. Instead of buying two machines (one for work and one for gaming).
    Reply
  • e56imfg
    Now do workstation CPUs :)
    Reply
  • guvnaguy
    Do companies use these cards for any sort of video game design? If so I could see why they need optimized for both applications.

    Just goes to show how under-utilized the high-end gaming hardware is. If that kind of driver tweaking went into gaming cards, you could probably max out Metro 2033 on a 8800GTX, eh?
    Reply
  • rmpumper
    I had a laptop with quadro fx3600m 3 years ago and from personal experience know that it was identical as the 8800GTm at gaming.
    Reply