Workstation-Shootout: ATi FireGL V7600 vs. Nvidia Quadro FX 4600

OpenGL Workstation Graphics - Market, Audience And Features

Looking at the workstation section of Nvidia's website, buyers will find a large variety of products. Aficionados will also discover several inconsistencies, though. For example, in some cases, the same product is associated with several market segments in the whitepapers. Additionally, the site lacks any information that would help differentiate between the current product line and last year's models - the model numbers alone give no indication of the what performance class the card actually belongs to.

While ATI's product naming scheme is not much more helpful or informative, it helps that the company's website differentiates between the 2006 and 2007 model years. While we don't want to get ahead of ourselves, we'll say at this point that buying the 2007 model is the better choice, regardless of what company you opt for.

To alleviate the problem of the confusing numbering scheme, and to help you tell the newcomers from last year's models, we have created the following table. Here, we attempt to group the cards into performance classes based on their real-world performance.

Key: * Graphics chip from last year's generation

Before we get to the tests themselves, let's recap the genealogy of the workstation cards. From a hardware perspective, professional cards are not really separately developed products. Instead, they are derivatives of mainstream and gaming cards, making them almost identical to their non-professional counterparts. However, as you probably know, mainstream cards are a lot less expensive.

Now, the resourceful buyer may be tempted to simply choose the cheaper alternative, but the graphics companies take steps to prevent this, by making small changes to the workstation cards' BIOSes and graphics chips. The drivers are then written so that a mainstream card only delivers very meager performance in workstation tasks. Thus, only a Quadro or FireGL card can come close to its theoretical maximum performance in OpenGL.

In the past, clock speeds were a relatively good indicator of performance, but today, you should focus more on the chip's technological details. With current cards, clock speed comparisons are only valid across the same chip generation - if you compare different generations, the numbers may quickly mislead you. One important criterion should be the shader model supported by the card. Our recommendation is to choose a card using shader model 4.0.

DirectX and OpenGL used to be competing APIs for software developers. Although OpenGL still dominates the workstation segment, DirectX is gaining more and more support as well. For example, 3D Studio Max 9.0 is a typical representative of workstation software. The application gives the user the choice between DirectX and OpenGL, but to achieve optimal shader performance, Tom's hardware recommends using DirectX in this case. Other software is increasingly using this API. Moreover, even the SPEC website includes DirectX results in the reference scores.

Key: SPUs = Stream Processing Units, P = Pixel Shader, V = Vertex Shader