Difference between nVidia Quadro and Geforce cards

Question

I m not a 3D or HPC guy  but I ve been tasked with doing some research into those fields for a possible HPC application  Reading benchmarks  comparisons and specs between nVidia Quadro and Geforce cards  it seems that for similar generation cards    Quadro is 2x-3x the price of Geforce hardware wise  the differences are not that great in benchmarks  3ds Max  Maya and some others  Quadro cards are much better performing than Geforce ones   Does anyone know what are the exact and precise technical differences that can cause such better performance  My speculation  and what can be generally read on the net   since the hardware is of similar specs   is that it s all in the drivers  If that s the case  what kind of functionality do the Quadro drivers offer that programmers of 3ds Max and other have taken advantage of   Of course  I m not interested in marketing speak  higher business value  professional oriented  better support  better QA  etc

User · Answer

Hardware wise the Quadro and GeForce cards are often idential. Indeed it is sometimes possible to convert some models from GeForce into Quadro by simply uploading new firmware and changing a couple resistor jumpers.

The difference is in the intended market and hence cost.

Quadro cards are intended for CAD. High end CAD software still uses OpenGL, whereas games and lower end CAD software use Direct3D (aka DirectX).

Quadro cards simply have firmware that is optimised for OpenGL. In the early days OpenGL was better and faster than Direct3D but now there is little difference. Gaming cards only support a very limited set of OpenGL, hence they don't run it very well.

CAD companies, e.g. Dassault with SolidWorks actively push high end cards by offering no support for DirectX with any level of performance.

Other CAD companies such as Altium, with Altium Designer, made the decision that forcing their customers to buy more expensive cards is not worthwhile when Direct3D is as good (if not better these days) than OpenGL.

Because of the cost, there are often other differences in the hardware, such as less use of overclocking, more memory etc, but these have relatively minor effects compared with the firmware support.

User · Answer

I have read that while the underlying chips are essentially the same  the design of the board is different   Gamers want performance  and tend to favor overclocking and other things to get high frame rates but which maybe burn out the hardware occasionally   Businesses want reliability  and tend to favor underclocking so they can be sure that their people can keep working   Also  I have read that the quadro boards use ECC memory   If you don t know what ECC memory is about  it s a  relatively  well known fact that sometimes memory  flips bits  experiences errors    This does not happen too often  but is an unavoidable consequence of the underlying physics of the memory cards and the world we live in  ECC memory adds a small percentage to the cost and a small penalty to the performance and has enough redundancy to correct occasional errors and to detect  but not correct  somewhat rarer errors  Gamers don t care about that kind of accuracy because for gamers those are just very rare visual glitches  Companies do care about that kind of accuracy because those glitches would wind up as glitches in their products or else would require more double or triple checking  which winds up being a 2x or 3x performance penalty for some part of their business    Another issue I have read about has to do with hooking up the graphics card to third party hardware  In other words  sending the images to another card or to another machine instead of to the screen  Most gamers are just using canned software that doesn t have any use for such capabilities  Companies that use that kind of thing get orders of magnitude performance gains from the more direct connections

User · Answer

It s called market segmentation or something like that  nVidia produces one very configurable chip and then sells it in different configurations that essentially have the same elements and hence the same bill of materials to different market segments  although one would usually expect to find elements of higher quality on the more expensive Quadro boards   What differentiates Quadro from GeForce is that GeForce usually has its dual precision floating point performance severely limited  e g  to 1 4 or 1 8 of that of the Quadro Tesla GPUs  This limitation is purely artificial and imposed on solely to differentiate the gamer enthusiast segment from the professional segment  Lower DP performance makes GeForce boards bad candidates for stuff like scientific or engineering computing and those are markets where money streams from  Also Quadros  arguably  have more display channels and faster RAMDACs which allows them to drive more and higher resolution screens  a sort of setup perceived as professional for CAD CAM work   As Jason Morgan has pointed out  there are tricks that can unlock some of the disabled features in GeForce to bring them in par with Quadro  Those usually involves soldering and voids the warranty on the card  Since HPC puts lots of stress on the hardware and malfunctions occur more frequently that one would like them to  I would advise against using cheap tricks

User · Answer

Surfing the web  you will find many technical justifications for Quadro price   Real answer is in  demand for reliable and task specific graphic cards    Imagine you have an architectural firm with many fat projects on deadline  Your computers are only used in working with one specific CAD software  If foundation of your business is supposed to rely on these computers  you would want to make sure this foundation is strong   For such clients  Nvidia engineered cards like Quadro  providing what they call  Professional Solution   And if you are among the targeted clients  you would really appreciate reliability of these graphic cards   Many believe Geforce have become powerful and reliable enough to take Quadro s place  But in the end  it depends on the software you are mostly going to use and importance of reliability in what you do

User · Answer

The difference is in view-port wire-frame rendering and double-sided polygon rendering  which is very common in professional CAD 3D software but not in games   The difference is almost 10x-13x faster in single-fixed rendering pipeline  now very obsolete but some CAD software using it  rendering double sided polygons and wireframes     Thats how entry level Quadro beats high-end GeForce  At least in the single-fixed pipeline using legacy calls like glLightModel GL LIGHT MODEL TWO SIDE  GL TRUE   The trick is done with driver optimization  does not matter if its single-fixed pipeline Direct3D or OpenGL   And its true that on some GeForce cards some firmware hardware hacking can unlock the features   If double sided is implemented using shader code  the GeForce has to render the polygon twice giving the Quadro only 2x the speed difference  it s less in real-world   The wireframe rendering remains much much slower on GeForce even if implemented in a modern way   Todays GeForce cards can render millions of polygons per second  drawing lines with faded polygons can result in 100x speed difference eliminating the Quadro benefit   Quadro equivalent GTX cards have usually better clock speeds giving 2 -10  better performance in games     So to sum up   The Quadro rules the single-fixed legacy now obsolete rendering pipeline  which CAD uses   but by implementing modern rendering methods this can be significantly reduced  virtually no speed gain in Maya s Viewport 2 0  it uses GLSL effects - very similar to game engine    Other reasons to get Quadro are double precision float computations for science  better warranty and display s support for professionals   That s about it  price-vise the Quadros or FirePros are artificially overpriced

[hardware] Difference between nVidia Quadro and Geforce cards?

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