Quadro series vs Geforce

[opethdisciple]

What do the quadro GPU's do that the regular Geforce cards cant?

Company I work for just purchased a quadro 580 for £170 and on paper is looks poor for the money....

I must be missing something...

 

[Cookeh]

Think the Quadro range is specialised for stuff like CAD.

 

[man_from_uncle]

Quadro's are normal cards with very specific firmware profiles (and probably a few tweaked or upgraded components) so they excel at CAD and DCC. You see them in work stations, but they tend to cost twice as much or more than their mainstream twin. Back when cards used pixel and vertex shaders these tweaks made a huge difference, though it was sometimes possible to flash a normal card to a quadro and/or back.

Not sure how much difference it makes now given that all the shaders are capable of the same things, though I understand certain AA features from Nvidia are reserved for these workstation cards.

 

[FrancesoNoir]

Agree with man_from_uncle. There's little physical difference between the Quadro and GeForce cards, but the drivers will be heavily optimised for the different applications. I'm struggling to find any benchies, but anecdotally, the workstation cards will run games but fall into serious issues with certain titles that have inbuilt driver support to ease identified problems. Expect artifacts and occasional weird glitches, although they should game fine.