Workstation vs Gaming card performance

[snowmanwithahat]

Hello All!

I just built a new system for my father... it was built out of spare / old parts that I had lying around, so it's quite 'slow' in comparison to modern machines. His main purpose was to install SolidWorks on this machine and use it for CAD designs that he does for a hobby (his work is pushing for all personally licensed software to be removed from work machines)

So the parts list consists of this;

Opteron 165 (1.8ghz - Dual core) socket 939
2gb (4x512mb) Kingston Value RAM DDR400
ASUS A8V Deluxe motherboard (VIA chipset)
6800 GT - AGP (soft-modded to a Quadro 4000)

As you can see it's pretty tame even by 4 years ago's standards. Anyway I installed everything on XP Pro (32-bit) and fired up SPECviewperf 10.0 and ran the SolidWorks benchmark.

Before the Quadro 4000 soft-mod;
1.78 fps

After the Quadro 4000 soft-mod;
19.28 fps

That's a whopping 10x performance increase!!! There's many tutorials on the interwebz on how to do it so that's not going to be within the scope of this thread... I just wanted to let everyone know how crazy the difference is, and how great of a performer older 68xx series cards are if you can soft-mod them.
Sadly you can't soft-mod anything past the 68xx series and that's mostly limited to the AGP ones anyway... but for reference I ran the benchmark on my own machine just to see how well it would handle this.

Specs are in sig (but just incase I'll list them here incase they change)

Q6600 (3.0ghz)
8gb OCZ DDR2-800
Gigabyte EP45 - UD3P
EVGA GTX 285 SC (725/1600/2800)

... I pulled in 9.79 fps... merely half of the budget machine I just built my father.

This was my first run-in with workstation cards and their true power... I'm absolutely shocked at how much better they are. I also ran the benchmark on his work laptop;

1.8ghz Core 2 Duo
4gb DDR2 ?
Quadro 1500m (79xx series equivalent... worst of the batch of 3.... 1500, 3500, 5500)

The work laptop pulled in ~30 fps...

Overall though I'm extremely happy that I got to put old parts to use and build him a very capable (for his specialized needs) for only $140... Also to anyone considering doing the same, the Quadro 4000 still retails in most places for $500+. It really is worth it to try this if you have old 68xx hardware laying around because the results are absolutely amazing.

[ekotan]

Your results are not surprising.

Workstation cards are optimised for workstation-class 3D apps, which typically work with complex wireframe models to display a high level of detail when engineers are designing and manipulating the model.

Gaming 3D cards are optimised for 3D games, which typically display textured, lit and shaded polygons instead of the bare wireframe models.

Because of software and hardware optimisations, gaming cards run 3D games faster than workstation cards, but workstation cards run professional 3D apps faster than gaming cards. That is as it should be. Perhaps in the future, technology will advance to the point where one card can do both types of apps at maximum speed, but not yet.

[snowmanwithahat]

one conjecture I had heard was that for workstation cards are optimzed for OpenGL as opposed to D3D... but that doesn't seem to really matter nearly as much as what you've said... complex wireframes

Regardless, I hope that success story of mine helps to prove that there is a legit use for these cards for those that don't understand them, and that this legit use is out of the scope of gaming.

I'd love to see nvidia pick up a different support model for quadro cards too...

Most companies buy them because of the warranty, and support that comes with workstation class cards vs gaming cards... it'd really be great if they went back to the days where you could soft-mod the new ones like I just did with the 6800. It would benefit very few people, mostly people like us who aren't professionals but need the power for a few select programs.

enterprise applications would still use quadro cards, but home-users could perform simple mods or driver changes, but not have the support that the real quadros carry.

[frenchy2k1]

Actually, the reason they forbid the soft mods was because it was eating into their margins, as companies started buying the consumer cards and soft modding those.

How can you tell? Easily, for the past 2 generations of cards at least, the chip is the same for pro and consumer parts There is some binning obviously, but the restriction is mostly to protect profit.

[snowmanwithahat]

Actually, the reason they forbid the soft mods was because it was eating into their margins, as companies started buying the consumer cards and soft modding those.

How can you tell? Easily, for the past 2 generations of cards at least, the chip is the same for pro and consumer parts There is some binning obviously, but the restriction is mostly to protect profit.

They've always, ALWAYS been the same chip, the only difference would be monitor connections, or available memory.

I highly doubt many 'real' companies would ever run soft-modded cards on a large scale due to reliability and support issues. Clearly they wanted to squash the soft-modding but I doubt they were taking as big of a financial loss as some make it out to be.