*Very* interesting. The "pro" cards came out better than I'd expected. (I'm the asshole who's been pushing gamer cards at all my 3D CG friends for years: "Pro cards are bullshit! It's a conspiracy!!")

I haven't ready every word of the entire article yet, but my gut feeling is that the areas where the gamer cards show up weakest, like hidden line display mode in autocad, is down to how the software drivers are written and what they're (ati and nvidia) optimizing it to do. (I can't think of any games that utilize hidden line graphics, hence the game card drivers suck at it.) I wonder how hard it would be for ati/nvidia to add fully optimized hidden line display code to their gamer card drivers... but then i also wonder why they would do that? It would only undermine their argument that us CAD monkeys need to be spending ~$1k for a decent video board. ("It's a conspiracy!")

Can either of you answer a few questions for me about this video card business? I haven't done any 3D modeling in a very long time. I remember the bottleneck was always CPU and memory. Video card ability stopped being relevant back in '98 when computers were still being branded as 'multimedia'. All cards became 'good enough'.

These tests only compare performance of panning around a 3D model. Since video cards send real-time information to your display, I can't really think of any other relevant tests for 3D models. Is being able to smoothly pan around a model that important? Your rendering times will not improve based on a video card. What kind of a justification would you give to a design studio that they need to spend more money on a video card? Some of these cards seem very expensive.

Thanks!

It's nothing to do with render time (producing "a rendering" for printing or whatever), this is all about smooth display while you're panning around (or zooming) in different display modes: wireframe, hidden line, shaded, etc.

Justification? I dunno. Shit's just faster. Life is a race. (I'm kidding). No, I mean, if you're working on a 3D model for a building (or doing plans/sections, etc.), it's painful to wait for the computer to redraw/refresh when you're already 3 steps ahead (in your mind).
[... screaming at the computer to catch up with you.]

Also, yeah, these cards are expensive. I wouldn't go any higher than $200 for the video board on a new build if I were doing it today. You can buy about 90% of the performance of these top-of-the-line cards for about half the price.

OK! That makes sense. I do remember, even back in the day, certain types of wire frame quick render modes (I'm thinking formZ, StudioMax, AutoCad) were more than fast enough to keep up with spastic pan-arounds. Perhaps software bloat has kept up with computer performance improvements. $200 seams like a reasonable price though.

Thanks Mission St.! btw, did you name yourself after a discount beer available at Trader Joe's? Can't beat a buck-a-bottle price!

i agree, the thing i took away is that in some instances, pro cards may give a boost, but when you think of the price difference between the pro and gamer cards, whether it is worth it is very questionable except in specific instances

also, in agreement with Mission St., there are cards that give you 90% of the performance for half the price of some of these

so for instance, the GTX 285 does very well and even is superior in some instances to the quadro fx cards --- i think when it was new, it retailed for around $400 --- i needed a new graphics card then, and started reading reviews --- the GTX 275 is practically a 285 but just a little bit detuned, but in several performance tests its numbers were close to or at the 285 numbers, for about $150 to $200 less --- I got it and it is great

formerly I had an $800 Quadro FX card

I would be very skeptical of ever spending that much again given the performance I get out of my $200 GPU, with mid-sized dual monitors and running graphics intensive (and opengl intensive) applications

on the pro side, at work i was given the quadro FX 1700 instead of the quadro fx 3700, the former being about 55-60% the cost of the latter, but the performance of the fx1700 was outstanding --- why pay $800 to $1000 when the $500 card does an excellent job

Some people "soft mod" their cards - they have hacks that allow them to use the pro drivers for the gamer cards. The higher end gamer cards have the same hardware as many of the pro cards, the difference is drivers and as you said there is no need for those drivers in game cards.

There is no technical support for gamer cards used for pro purposes, if you are having technical issues and you call and say why is it doing this when I use autocad, or perhaps it doesn't even work with autocad the response is buy a pro card. In a business environment having a computer (and it's corresponding employee) be unable to work for even a day because the card your using doesn't have drivers for the latest version of autocad that you just upgraded can be very costly. That is one reason to go pro.

The other is as has been stated they can be VERY slow. If simple pans in drafting take an extra 2-3 seconds and you're doing that every 30 seconds - one minute that's 5% of your time wasted waiting on your computer. Do the math in billable hours for a year and a high-end card makes lots of sense in a business environment. Clients don't pay for wasted time because you have slow computer.In a big model you will be waiting much longer than that.

Some of the new rendering engines do in fact use graphics cards for rendering mostly for real time rendering so that has become a consideration.

But I use a gamer card... I will be going pro from now on, just can't justify the slow refresh rate with all these super heavy models I'm having to deal with these days, it's really hurting my productivity.

I don't know, i've built some pretty good sized models with the two year old gamer card and it does not slow up at all

having said that, this is not a $50 or $100 gamer card

but from my experience and as is attested to in countless forums, a $200 to $400 gamer card with good RAM should be fine

also keep in mind that unless a driver is specifically written for your app (like for 3dsmax or autocad), and unless the app and GPU driver's support the same version(s) of opengl or directx, you could still have difficulties no matter what kind of card you have --- choosing a GPU is more involved than just picking ATI vs Nvidia or gamer vs pro series