“We’ve have always wondered whether a professional card, such as the NVIDIA Quadro FX series, can let us play games with as much ease as its GeForce counterparts. The reason is that most of the games are designed for consumer-end cards, so it makes sense that if the very cards that design the games should be able to play those games as well.”
The professionnal cards are for people who like to tinker with maya/3ds max or other applications, that are very hungry for performance…
A brand new nvidia quadro fx 3400 costs more than 1000 €.
If you are a hardcore gamer, just buy a dual geforce 7800 gtx (in Sli mode) and you have much more performance/bang for the buck in games ….
Btw, the nvidia quadro 3400 fx is the equivalent of ONE geforce 6800 GT…
Edited 2006-01-30 18:25
I haven’t read the article quite just yet (just the opening part), but just because it was used to make the games doesn’t mean it’ll be good for playing the games.
Professional graphics cards are designed to render accurately first, fast second. Gaming cards take shortcuts in rendering for speed’s sake (at least, that’s the way it was back in the day).
If you happen to have access to one of these cards they do quite well on Linux based systems. 2379 frames in 5.0 seconds = 475.800 FPS on a Quadro 1300 PciE displayed full screen on a 21.3″ nec mutlisync 2180oux lcd at 1200×1600. Oh, and it plays Warcraft FT and NWN real nice too!
Ok, it’s less bang for buck for gaming. Ok, but where do you get advantage?
The main reason these cards is more expensive is that once they release it, they will not change a single item in the BOM (Bill of Materials). The reason is certification, as Will said, these cards are optimised for accuracy, and professional applications will certify that they work correctly and to the required level of accuracy against a card and maybe one or two different driver versions.
The upshoot of this is that an Integrator can sell a certified solution for 2 years for a particular application, they will not need to retest/recertify every 6 months as the card they use becomes obsolete. These professional cards tend to have much longer life-spans than their gaming variants, and will still be availiable 2 years after release – unchanged.
…for the enormous price is (as ultrajimmy said) accuracy. This means that there are only a (very) small number of artefacts compared to a gaming card.
Artefacts = miscoloured or dropped-out pixels, and particularly edge-effects (like an over-compressed .jpeg) where coloured fringes can appear round items. Not really relevant for gaming.
I still use an old 64M Quadro2 (c. 2000AD) for 3D where appropriate.