I was wondering, whats the honest difference between workstation and gaming gpu's. I see £300 workstation gpu's from nvidia that are passive cooled and tiny and I just wonder why they cost so much, and whats the honest difference between say, the quadro and firepro series' to the 700 & R series cards, and are they really worth that much to editors? I remember a while back someone changed part of a 690 and it showed up as the quadro equivalent card that was twice the price.
the physical builds of the cards are actually quite similar.... to the point some cards can be flashed in BIOS to their workstation equivalent (not really recommended, but hey... possible)...
There's a few main differences, however... namely in the drivers and support... consumer cards are built for speed and optimized for DirectX... they offer support for hardware GPU problems, but nothing related to crashing programs or games unless it is decided to be a faulty hardware issue... They are built to run games, basically...
Professional cards are built for stability over speed and have drivers optimized for Open GL, which is the platform most 3D modeling, animation, and rendering software uses. The support goes a lot deeper and is much more responsive... If let's say, Solidworks crashes during a specific operation, the manufacturer is bound to giving you support to resolve the issue. This is due to the workstation card having a direct correlation to productivity and a company losing money... The are built to make money with basically..
There are definite differences in the FPS of models between consumer and professional GPUs when using solids... wireframe models tend to not matter so much...
So in a nutshell: Stability vs Speed... better 3D model processing... and specific support... btw they tend to suck in games :)
Is it possible to run a workstation and gaming gpu in the same system?
Never attempted it, but I'd imagine no... I'd build two computers if I did serious 3D work as a home based business and wanted a high end gaming system as well...
Otherwise, if you're just dabbling in 3D modeling and rendering and such, a consumer gaming GPU will run it fine... you might encounter a crash here or there from the drivers, but they don't suck at productivity... I do some modelling on Solidworks at home every now and then and I've never had a problem with consumer GPU... it's just not specifically tailored for it
Ah I see, thanks for explaining this panda, its been something Ive been wondering since I started building pc's.
It is possible , but I don't think so for just one monitor. If you have a minimum of two monitors you could do that. Plus, you should see how much wattage both cards will draw as well as your system and take that into account.
There are some videos on Youtube with old Quadro cards and geforce cards in the same system I think the 600D with a 680 not sure. The same applies for ATI Radeon (AMD) and Firepro.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk08DHhhxc4 - 680 & Quadro
An ideal scenario for this would be gaming on one monitor (separate gpu) and adobe on the other.
Learn something every day... curious how driver updates and selecting what program uses what GPU works though...