so In the latest "tek or inbox" logan and wendal talk about adobe premier and other rendering programs using CUDA and openCL and it reminded me about the seemingly "apple like" over priced workstation cards from both Nvidia and AMD..
so.. what is the point of these workstation cards when you can put the work load on a nice powerful multi purpose GPU when work station cards are indeed also GPU's? or am i missing something?
the pricing on these things seem INSANE! and the cheaper cards look like graphics cards you would find in grandmas old computers... Are these cards worth the price for rendering applications? is there something special about the cards that even though they look like low performance graphics cards they actually run circles around them?
They are well worth it. When you're a professional, time is money. Having the professional cards, which push less, but each push is leagues more precise and "harder," "stronger," plus the much more developed drivers and support, make them necessary for actual professionals who need the GPU compute power. They are designed differently, and meant for super power in either OpenCL, or CUDA, depending on if it's a FirePro, Quadro, Tesla, etc. You will not get the same power out of a $650 GPU, like a 780, with a $650 professional card; the professional card will rape the consumer card, just destroy it.
If you need push lots of pixels, and push the fast, then get a consumer card, with lots of VRAM, but if you are doing any serious editing, then you should already know you need a workstation card.
so for someone like me who wants to do lots of HD video edditing in adobe after effects and premier It would be best to get my gtx 780 for gaming and a sub $200 workstation card for edditing and working?
would a sub $200 card like the Nvidia quadro k600 truly out perform my gtx 780 that much?
I dont plan on doing this but would like to know for educational purposes and maybe a future purchase.
A sub-$200 card probably wouldn't out-perform your 780. If I were you, I'd get a 7870XT and a Firepro V7900.