Quadro : What is with them?

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The hardware is the 99.9999% same as GeForce cards. The difference is mostly in the driver.

Nice link Mmansueto.. Some good info in that paper.

Most Quadro's (and ATI's fireGL models) also come standard with a stereo glasses port for shutter glasses. The higher end quadro's (and fireGL's) are made with the top performing cores off the production line and the top performers of those cards are usually reserved for specific customers.

I have an 8800 gts 640 and a quadro 3450 (soon to be 2 of them in SLI) and the score difference in 3Dmark06 has the 8800 about 3kpoints higher but there is a hugely noticeable difference when playing games. I am going to check again when I get the 3450's sli'd.

Part of the driver advantage is that nVidia/ATI will work with companies like Autodesk to develop a fine tuned driver that works specifically with their products. Back in the day, the nVidia folks were at SGI developing a chip (at the time it was one chip) to do Open GL H/W acceleration. This chip was based off of one that SGI had originally developed for their Super Computer Graphics systems. I think most of that work now resides on the GPU.

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You can softmod GeForce to Quadro... results vary though

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I have heard of but have read specifically the 8600 and 570 are the same but the 8600 has had hardware functions crippled. And as you know software overcoming hardware? Not were you want to be. And while the soft mod certainly likely would improve OpenGL performance will not correct the hardware issues.

I did read about the HD2600 being software modded to a FireGL and I have not read it was hardware crippled.

I think of this the same way I think of say C2D vs PDC. Sure they might of started off with C2D that didn't test/pass and wanting to get at least some return. At some point they just start intentionally crippling to preserve market/price position. To expensive to make a different chip, cheaper to cripple? And cheaper for NVidia also?

And on that note read the last sentence of my last post. I may have outdone myself.

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LOL I laugh at Gelato. Its a good idea but someone other than Nvidia needs to make a GPU based rendering engine.

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There is a chart somewhere but the 8800gt and the FX3700 are basically the same exact card. The FX3700 is about 800 dollars last time I checked.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Quadro#PCI_Express

FX3450 = NV42GL = GeForce 6800
FX3700 = G92 = 8800GT (112SP)

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That's what I was going to say, the stereoscopic support, which is now possible with Geforce cards.

Same as everyone has been saying, Quadro cards are for workstations. I believe some had Displayport connections, something that I've only seen on them (and my monitor )

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I thought that all GeForce had stereoscopic support since they aquired 3Dfx.

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I agree it would be sweet to see GPU based rendering becoming more mainstream, perhaps with CUDA someone might develop a decent solution, although I suspect the likes of Autodesk would not want to upset ATI users by leaving them out in the cold. Although Adobes move with the Quadro CX supporting video encoding is quite interesting.