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GTX vs. Quadro vs. AMD FirePro

M

Moflo

n00b
Joined
Mar 10, 2014
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So I have been at this for a while now, reading every thing I could find. Right now I'm running an MSI Lightning GTX 680 witch is based on the Kepler and has 256 Bit bus width and 192 GB/s of bandwidth. It also supports anything form CUDA to OpenCL, DirectCompute etc.

As a CGI artist I use 3DS Max, VRay and Photoshop, but I'm starting to look at Octane and using Fusion 7. I've also bought a new screen, the ASUS PA279Q. Despite the bad things I've read about the screen, it is amazing, at least compared to my old 6bit TFT panel.

So I started to look at some Quadro cards and found out that 3DS Max uses Nitrous Direct3D 11 and the specific drivers on Quadro are old and not working well. As for Photoshop CC it seams to use OpenGL rather than CUDA. On the other hand, Octane only runs on Nvida because it uses CUDA and prefers GTX cards.

So the question at hand is if there is really a point in buying a Quadro. The only issue I have right now is not being able to us 10bit color depth since that is a feature only on Pro cards. This would only be visible in Photoshop or Fusion when editing and maybe in VRay, but I'm not sure.

I also read that Quadro do outperform GTX cards because of specific drivers, but the drivers are spears. Most of them are dependent on the model of Quadro you have and even then Photoshop CC or Max 2014 don't seam to be on the list. This changes with AMD, so I have taken a look at their cards and found that a W5000 is not to expensive. I also compared my GTX680 and the equivalent would be a W7000.

So, should I upgrade to Quadro/AMD? and even if I do, would a cheaper model do the trick just to get some Pro features and use the GTX for anything else.
 
I'm not trying to upgrade my GTX680 but a Titan X would be nice, especially for GPU rendering. My problem is that any GTX card does not have the Pro features from Quadro/FirePro. I need a 30bit able card with up to date drivers for all the above mentioned software. I found AMD to be better in this department than Quadro.

So if I wear to go with AMD FirePro would it work faster or have better quality than the GTX680 I'm running now. My goal would be to have 2 different cards running on the same system, each one on a different display
 
BTW not sure if typo, but Quadro can use Nitrous, DirectX11 or OpenGL.

3DS MAX uses nitrous by default, but DirectX11 is about as fast and sometimes faster, OpenGL is too slow and I think no longer supported.

Its been a while since I used Quadro, but driver development was great back when I used it.
There's a reason why nvidia owns like 90%+ of the professional market, you know?

Photoshop CC now uses OpenCL (for compute) and OpenGL. But keep in mind that many 3rd party plugins still use only CUDA.

Now on Quadro vs Geforce. Yes quadro is faster for the most part (up to 30%) on "equivalent" GPU. But is it worth the price premium? that's for you to decide.

BTW what's your budget? Jumping from GTX680 to say a quadro K5000 is going to cost more than a TitanX, hence my first recomendation.
 
No typo, the driver is Nitrous Direct3D 11 which is used by default. Your right, it uses the DirectX11 and you can chose Direct3D9, Legacy Direct3D and Legacy OpenGL. So right now I'm using DirectX11 via the Nitrous display driver.

So the fact is that my GTX680 is the exact same hardware than the Quadro K5000, The only difference being that the Quadro should perform better with professional applications and the GTX should run games like hell.
All of this is achieved trough drivers which makes me a little unhappy about NVIDIAs politics. So that is why I took a peak at AMD.

I had a Quadro K600 for a few month and I had a lot of trouble in Max. The viewports had some issues. Of course the K600 is not the best ship you can get. According to what you have said, I have read you should get between 10-30% better performance.
But is that really true? The 3DS Max certified drivers seem up to date. But for Adobe Photoshop the only certified drivers are for CS4 and CS5 and none of them is a Kxxx model nor they support Windows 8.1.
Still, buying a K5000 is not really what I had in mind. I think it is far to much money for something I'm not sure I will appreciate. After all, I'm still rendering in VRay so I need some serious CPU power. So at this point I could go for a K2200 with a decent price tag or take a look at the K4200 but it seams a lot of money already. For a little less I could get a FirePro W7100 with pretty much the same specs than the K4200.

I don't really have a budget, this comes all down to whether I feel that I get something worth my money and whether I really need it or will appreciate it.
 
Buy a cheaper (even old gen) 10-bit capable Quadro for driving your display and use a GTX card for the actual work. Even without the "pro" features a GTX card offers much better price/performance in 90% of the programs (be sure to pick the right GTX cards).
 
At first I took a look at the K620 but since my experience with the K600 was not to great the next step would be a K2200. So how far back should I go, Fermi based or older??
 
I found some great articles about Quadro Maxwell and AMD's latest FirePro. For my purpose I'll go with Quadro and still looking at the K2200. Seams they have improved a lot form the Kepler based K2000 or the Fermi. Since they cost almost the same (new not used) I don't see a point in going back.

About the only thing I would like to know, is there any difference between NVIDIA HP PNY Lenovo??? These seam to be the distributors for Quadro. Some people argue PNY does mass production, whilst HP might have a tighter quality control or support. So do you guys have some experience in that department?? or is it all just the same?
 
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