With SLi becoming increasingly prevalent, is there any room for Quadros?

[teqguy]

Considering that the only noticable technical difference between consumer cards and professional cards is the price tag... and with SLi still topping off at hundreds of dollars less than the Quadro series, is there really any room for it anymore?

Nvidia could salvage the margain between SLi'ed 6800GT's(or even 6600GT's) and a single Quadro by cutting the price to slightly less than two 6800GT's... or by making some of their software, such as Gellato, proprietary to only the Quadro.

I realize that a few of the models from the Quadro series can be SLi'ed, but the price is exorbitant, not to mention the implementation is identical to the 6600GT and 6800GT... which happens to be CPU dependant at driver level to synchronize the two cards' rendering.


What I have yet to understand is why they haven't jumped to a dual GPU solution, like 3DLabs did a long time ago.

[retsam]

has nvidia released a pci-ex based quadros yet... this may answer some question... but my fealing is YES there is no way in hell nvidia would pass up the extra money they could make from passing off quadro based sli...

[teqguy]

They already have SLi support on their 4400 and two other models.

The point I'm trying to make is why would anyone go out and buy a single quadro, when they could softmod SLi 6600GT's or 6800GT's into Quadros and reap almost double the reward of a competitively priced Quadro.


If only there were professional video encoders available to take advantage of the 6 Series' PureVideo hardware video encoding... that'd be a nice affordable workstation. The processor could either sit idle or help out, while the GPU(s) render frames.

[MUYA]

Drivers? Qualified support etc? Yes you can mod the desktops to be recognised as Quadros but, it's just my opinion that in an industry where you would need specific drivers or help or tech support for specific applications on specific OS environments, companies will choose a Quadro. You can SLI Quadros too! Just my opinion.

[teqguy]

The only reason you would ever have to softmod is if the software proprietary to the Quadro, such as Gelato: http://film.nvidia.com/page/gelato.html

But, after seeing those screenshots, I don't even know if I'd want to use their software. Pixar's RenderMan or mentalRay look a lot better.

Now that you mention the drivers... I wonder if I could get them to work on the Geforce series if I did a hardmod or forced install. They have additional features such as UMA that I'm not entirely sure are hardware based.

[MUYA]

I wasn't on about Gelato specifically. Different apps and OS's.

[teqguy]

I know, I'm just saying that's the only time you'd really find a need to softmod... is when the software rejects consumer level cards.

[ricercar]

Quadros have hardware processing (Anti aliasing, clip regions, etc) that is not available on GeForce, SLI or no. SLI would help Quadro+workstation cards in their modes as much as it helps GeForce and gaming.


For differences between Quadro and GeForce see the link about halfway down
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_20030630_7410.html
Technical Brief: Quadro vs. GeForce GPUs
Learn all about the differences between NVIDIA's consumer-level GeForce GPUs and workstation-class Quadro GPUs in the attached technical brief. (2MB PDF)

[teqguy]

I know there are some differences, but most of them don't affect post production renders.

The hardware antialiasing refers specifically to CAD work, which needs precise, un-jagged lines... and I really don't understand the point of clip regions, as I've never seen graphical degredation by overlapping windows.

Has never happened to me in any software I use.