Quadro and FireGL… Why so expensive? What are they?
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I’m sure that anyone who’s built their own PC or been in the business of using them for long enough has heard the terms Quadro or FireGL tossed around. If one were to look them up, you’d find that they are typically double the price of an equivalent Geforce or Radeon product. The first thought now is “Why?”, or “Wow they must be awesome!”. This happened to me, and I thought I’d check things out. I thought it only proper to share my findings with whoever may be reading this.
I’m sure you’ve used an nVidia Geforce at one time or another, from the Geforce 3 to the 8800 GTX OC, I’ve been using one off and on. They are great cards, with heavy power for gaming. At the moment, they’re in the lead for powerful cards, with ATI right behind the corner with their HD card, which supposedly will blow my Geforce 8800 GTX OC out of the water in DX10 using it’s more than doubled number of stream processors (but I’m doubtful, hehe). Radeon is the equivalent of a Geforce in ATI terms - Oh and before it sounds like I’m an nVidia fanboy, I previously was a user of an X1800XTX 512MB, excellent card. I’m with whoever’s in the lead, and that means nVidia right now.
My 8800GTX is the newest card in the nVidia line, which blows through games with skyrocketing framerates. My modded, texturepack-enhanced version of oblivion on maximum settings runs between 80-120FPS outdoors, and this is more than impressive. I built my machine for Oblivion at high FPS, and it has done it’s job. Needless to say, it is worth the $650 I spent in January, though of course less now.
If you were to buy the latest Quadro card, it would likely cost about twice as much, and be outperformed greatly. The Quadro cards, you see, aren’t designed for 3D applications. Yes, that’s right, they are designed for 2D. They have extremely powerful performance in applications for Video editing, Photoshop, CAD, etc. Geforce cards have extreme performance for 3D rendering in a modeling application, games, and anything else that needs extreme 3D performance. FireGL cards are to Radeon as Quadro are to Geforce.
Since they are based on the same cores, various parts of the Geforce line could be converted to Quadro cards by connecting certain lines on the card. This is largely impossible now, but you could convert (I believe) 5 series Geforces into the equivalent Quadro by drawing lines in the right place in pencil. Yes I said that. This is no longer possible, unfortunately.
In conclusion, for the typical 2D user a Geforce is fine, and better at handling games and the like anyhow. I do Photoshop professionally, and find little difference between a Quadro and my Geforce 8800 GTX. There is a difference there, however, so if you want to squeeze the speed from your system (and not play as many intensive games on the maximum) switch to Quadro.
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