New dedicated pro-grade GPUs from AMD and Nvidia are joined by the first FirePro-certified HSA APUs. http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2012/08/08/amd-nvidia-pro-gpus/1
For that price I can have a quad SLI setup and still have some money in the pocket. Pro or not, it is nothing different from the Gaming variants. So what makes the price difference?
they are very different from the gaming equivalents as they are totally optimised for the tasks professional rendors, modelling cad uses etc I bet if you benched a gaming GPU it would come anywhere near these in terms of throughput
If you're talking raw compute performance, you'd be surprised: the official figures for the Radeon HD 7970 3GB put it at 3,790 gigaflops single-precision and 947 gigaflops double-precision, which compares favourably with the top-end FirePro W9000 6GB's 3,990 gigaflops single-precision and 1,000 gigaflops double-precision figures given the disparity in pricing. What you're *really* paying for in the FirePro cards is the certification and the drivers, which guarantee accuracy, stability and support for professional software including 3D rendering, CAD and multimedia stuff in a way the consumer-grade cards and drivers do not.
No idea about current generation cards (I'm not so well healed) but the FX4600 smashes 8800GTS/X in most "professional" applications... this gives you an idea of the differences involved (SM = SoftModded as post 7800 it's not possible to flash geforce to quadro)
Whoopsie - I meant stream processors. That's the danger of mixing AMD and Nvidia in one article - you forget which made-up terminology belongs to which company. Fixed, ta!
Even the entry level V3800 (equivalent to an HD5570 with half bandwidth) smashes the more powerfull HD5770 on CAD software like Maya, 3DS, Pro Engineer, etc. You're mainly paying for optimized and certified drivers. Pro cards also have 30bits color resolution, quadbuffering and higher level of AA.
That is interesting, but keep in mind nvidia open-sourced CUDA - I'm sure to them at this point competing against openCL isn't worth their time and effort. Either way, a workstation APU sounds like a fantastic idea. Switch to the APU when you want to do something workstation related and use a PCI-e 16x slot for gaming purposes. In the workstation graphics world, I've come to notice that (at least as of the last series), the v3900 to v5900 are pretty close in performance and price range. Overclock a v3900 and you MIGHT get close to the v5900. I believe the v5900 is equivelant to a HD5750, and the v3900 is a HD5670. That being said, a workstation APU could really supply some compelling performance. Once you go to v7900 and higher, you get a lot more performance but the price nearly quadruples. Workstation GPUs as of today seem to be what AMD is best at of all of their product categories. They're overall faster and cheaper than nvidia's. @ GuilleAcoustic Haha not only does the v3800 pwn the 5770, but what you just showed is a linux benchmark, and anyone who has tried linux before knows that AMD doesn't pay much attention to linux. Just shows that workstation graphics really do make a difference at times.
I always go to Phoronix when I need Linux benches . The APU on the A320 is a little faster than the V3900, could make a very small and interesting Pro rig. Another interesting bench : W5000 vs V5900 vs Quadro 2000
You're basically paying for ECC RAM (well on the Teslas now a days), accuracy, error correction, and drivers. Also support. You pretty much get top notch support for these cards purely because they're so expensive.
Ars Technica has an article today (a review of HP and Dell workstations, in the absence of a new Mac Pro) that has an actually quite decent breakdown of the differences between gaming cards and pro cards. Interestingly, the situation is different on OS X. That is, report that Maya doesn't work on your GTX 680 under Windows, they'll tell you "tough luck, buy a Quadro." Report the same problem on OS X, they file a bug report and fix it. Some small upside of the terrible hardware selection for Mac, I suppose :\ All that said, there's one of you in every thread on these articles - yeah, no kidding you could get a quad-SLI-whatever for the same kind of money - THEY"RE FOR DIFFERENT PURPOSES. If I was making a living doing professional graphics work, I wouldn't necessarily bat an eye dropping $4k on a video card. What gets me are the people who drop even $1k on a graphics setup for gaming. Once you get past two-card SLI/XFire, the returns generally get so incremental that all you're really increasing is your e-peen. But, hey, it's your money - tell me how it works out when you try to pick up chicks at the bar with tales of what a kickass "gaming rig" you've got
To pre-empt the hilarious comments that invariably ensue on anything GPU related - will it blend? Will it run Crysis? This will be awesome for folding / bitcoin mining. Blah blah blah.
