Workstation video card

Krynn72

Krynn72

The Freeman
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Anyone have any experience with them? Im considering getting one instead of a gaming card to replace my 7800gt, but I still want to play games. Im sick of all the display issues and slowdowns when working in Maya and Zbrush, which would be essentially solved with a workstation card, but I dont want to loose out on the new games.

How would this measure up to an 8800?
 
That would be a 79xx card in quadro form. The Quadro FX 4600 (G80) is similar to that of a 8800GTS for specs. The Quadro FX 5600 is speced higher than the 8800GTX. But...they actually run games slower. Example
(optimization is completely different between the workstation and 3D game cards regarding drivers)

Performance
Price:
V7600
Quadro FX4600

which would you pick? ATI sorta hit a homerun for this series. Seems workstation stuff takes advantage of the extra logic in the R600 cards that games can't.
 
Wow, the V7600 kicked the shit out of the quadro in maya, and it handled crysis pretty well. Its also twice as expensive as I was looking at, but damn, those 8800gts scores in Maya make me hesitant to go that way too. Looks like it will be awhile before I can afford to upgrade.

Thanks for the info.
 
Ok, so i'm thinking about this again now. I have a nice job now and can afford to spend some mo monies. My current computer is pretty nice, but I'm going to be getting into some serious hardcore 3D graphics and video work soon, and I wont have my school's resources to do it with. So I'm thinking of getting a workstation pc.

Thing is, I already bought a nice 4850 for gaming purposes, and that means i have some options.

First, I could get two PCs, a gaming rig and a workstation rig. But I think that would be kind of annoying, and frankly, I dont have space in my small room for two desktops.

Second option would be sell this whole PC and just deal with the crappy game performance.

Third option would be something my friend said may be possible. When we went to Siggraph last year, he said he talked to one of the Boxx guys who said that his home computer has both a workstation card, and a gaming card, and that he could switch between the two by rebooting to which ever card he wanted to use. Anyone know would that work?
 
You need 8gb of ram and like 10 video cards.
 
Double that ram, and you'll be closer to what I plan to get :E
 
Get one of those prototype computers developed for the US army. No hard drive, just 80 gigs of ram.
 
They're not paying for it. I'll be using my own money that they paid me for mah work.

pws.jpg


EDIT: Actually, I wont be getting that hard drive. Ill use the one have now. And I probably wont even get that card. I'll probably get an ATI 5600 instead, since it performs better in Maya.
 
So this Maya generates ****loads of stuff that games don't have in one particular category?
 
What? Maya is a 3D App used for modeling, animating, making special fx, and rendering.

And the biggest reason I want a workstation is for Zbrush which I have models with tens of millions of polygons, while having maya open with the scene and photoshop open with several high resolution textures. Plus, every gaming card ive had has had serious problems in maya with the viewport.
 
yeah so doesnt maya do the same thing as a game? just more one sided on something that requires some $4000 card to get done.
 
Workstation cards are designed to handle shit-tons of polygons at a stable and high framerate. Gaming cards are designed to handle much less polygons at a much less stable framerate, but while actually rendering other stuff.

Also, I'm looking at ~$400 workstation cards, not $4000.
 
I'm surprised there are sub $1000 cards, all I've ever seen were $2000+, must make a big difference.
 
Oh hell yeah it does. But that would cost like 150% more on top of the rest of the computer haha. Screw that.
 
Bump.

I just wanted to ask, instead of making a new thread...

Are workstation graphics cards so much better that they justify being so many more times expensive than gaming graphics cards?

What is the big ****ing difference anyway, other than what Krynn said previously... and is that even true?
 
I like Blender... I love the idea of free things like that... and it does incredible fluids.

Too bad the work flow is so difficult to get used to. :(

For me anyway.
 
I installed it for the first time last night. I had to disable Desktop Effects (Compiz), since OpenGL apps fighting eachother for refresh causes many problems. After that, I figured out that Blender has mouse gestures (probably for tablets) and my numpad controls the camera. That's about as far as I got. :P
 
The hardware isn't that much different. But the drivers are tuned for rendering apps and not games. Usually FPS in games is south and rendering frames is way up with workstation cards.

Also, dependability in the drivers are high for those apps. Hospitals use them. Business use them. Money is on the line.
The amount of money a gamers card earns Nvidia is not enough to make them care about having absolutely zero glitches while playing games.
 
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