Do you know the difference between GeForce and Quadro cards? People often ask about differences between Quadro and GeForce adapters since they have similar functions but greatly different prices. You might have heard that hackers can modify a GeForce to a Quadro card, and that these cards have very similar performances but with some exceptions: Quadro is the only card meeting all workstation applications while GeForce card is only 95% similar to the Quadro. Therefore Quadro consumers prefer Quadro FX because they need the extra 5% the Quadro platform offers over GeForce.

What's the most important characteristic of a workstation graphics card? The term "professional workstation" can imply: expectations of high quality, excellent reliability, responsive support, and high performance. Workstation users generally expect their system to help them achieve great success .

Differences between a Professional Card (Quadro) and a Gaming Card (GeForce):

The Quadro FX professional series is highly similar to consumer GeForce FX lines. Both share a common design architecture including DirectX 9/OpenGL programmable fragment/pixel and vertex shaders, pipelines, and support for floating-point frame buffer. In order to differentiate between these two products, please be noted of the following additional capabilities specific to NVIDIA Quadro FX:

Workstation Customers Expectations --

Workstation users generally have high expectations of their systems: It's a tool, not a toy; they need to work with it. Their main job is to design, create scenes or demonstrate their work. Time is precious, so they don't accept crashes, baffling bugs or delays in workflow.

In most companies the purchased hardware should work for an extended period of time.
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Product Line Differences --

There are notable differences between Quadro and GeForce cards, and a great effort is put into creating the perfect solution for both parties.

Anti-aliased points and lines for wire frame display

A unique feature of Quadro GPUs is supporting anti-aliased lines in hardware, which has nothing in common with GeForce's full-scene anti-aliasing. It works for lines (but not for shaded polygons) without sacrificing system performance or taking extra video memory for over-sampling. Since this feature is standardized by OpenGL, it is supported by most professional applications.

OpenGL logic operations

Another unique feature of Quadro GPUs is supporting OpenGL Logical Operations which can be implemented as the last step in the rendering pipeline before contents is written to the frame buffer. For example workstation applications can use this functionality to mark a selection by a simple XOR function. When this function is done in hardware, such significant performance loss as a GeForce adapter would cause will not happen. OpenGL can be used for either consumer or workstation adapters.

The most common applications for GeForce adapters are full-screen OpenGL games. CAD applications work with OpenGL windows in combination with 2D-elements.

Up to eight clip regions (GeForce supports one)

A typical workstation application contains 3D and 2D elements. And while view ports display window-based OpenGL function, menus, rollups and frames are still 2D elements. They often overlap each other. Depending on how they are handled by the graphics hardware, overlapping windows may noticeably affect visual quality and graphics performance. When windows are not overlapped, the entire contents of the color buffer can be transferred to the frame buffer in a single, continuous rectangular region. However, if windows do overlap, transfer of data from the color buffer to the frame buffer must be broken into a series of smaller, discontinuous rectangular regions. These rectangular regions are referred to as "clip" regions.

GeForce Hardware supports only one clip region which is sufficient for displaying menus in OpenGL. Quadro GPUs support up to 8 clip regions in hardware, keeping up the performance in normal workflow using CAD/DCC applications.

Hardware accelerated clip planes

Clip planes allow specific sections of 3D-objects to be displayed so that users can look through the solid objects for visualizing assemblies. For this reason, many professional CAD/DCC applications do provide clip planes. The GPU of the Quadro family supports clip-plane acceleration in hardware - a significant improvement in performance when they are used in professional applications.

Optimization on Memory usage for multiple graphics windows

Another feature offered by the GPUs of Quadro family is Quadro memory management optimization, which efficiently allocates and shares memory resources between concurrent graphics windows and applications. In many situations, this feature directly affects application performance and offers considerable benefits over consumer-oriented GeForce GPU family.

The graphics memory is used for frame buffer, textures, caching and data. NVIDIA's unified memory architecture allocates the memory resources dynamically instead of keeping a fixed size for the frame buffer. Instead of wasting the unused frame buffer memory, UMA (Unified Memory Architecture) allows it to be used for other buffers and textures. When applications require more memory from quad-buffered stereo or full scene anti-aliasing, manage resources efficiently has becomre a more important issue.

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Support for two-sided lighting

Quadro hardware supports two-sided lighting. Non-solid objects may display triangles from their "backside" when viewing the objects from the inside. Two-sided lighting prevents the lighting effect from dropping to zero when the object surface normal points away from the lighting source. As a result, these "backward-facing" triangles will remain visible from all possible viewing angles.

Hardware overlay planes

The user interface of many professional applications often require elements to be interactively drawn on top of a 3D model or scene. The cursor, pop-up menus or dialogs will appear on top of the 3D-viewport. These elements can damage the contents of the covered windows or affect their performance and interactivity.

To avoid this, most professional applications use overlay planes. Overlay planes allow items to be drawn on top of the main graphics window without damaging the contents of the windows underneath. Windows drawn in the overlay plane can contain text, graphics etc - the same as any normal window.

The planes also support the transparency function, which when set allows pixels from underneath the overlayed window to show through. They are created as two separate layers. This prevents possible damage to the main graphics window and it also improves performance. Likewise, showing an overlayed window as transparent with graphics inside allows items in the user interface to be drawn over the main graphics window.

Clearing and redrawing only the overlayed window is significantly faster than redrawing the main graphics window. This is how animated user-interface components can be drawn over 3D models or scenes.

Support for quad-buffered stereo for shutter glasses

The Quadro GPU family supports quad-buffered stereo, but GeForce GPU family does not. Quad-buffered stereo is a type of OpenGL functionality which does not depend on any special stereo hardware to show the effect. Two pictures, both double-buffered, are generated. Display is done alternately or interlaced, depending on the output device.

Many professional applications like 3ds max, SolidWorks or StudioTools allow users to view models or scenes in three dimensions using a stereoscopic display. It can be done by a plug-in like in Solidworks, an application driver like MAXtreme in 3ds max, an external viewer like QuadroView for autocad-based products, or by the application itself. The use of stereoscopic display is to have an overview in complex wire frame constructions, making walkthroughs much more realistic and impressive or simply to improve the display of large 3D-scenes. Stereo support on Quadro GPU family significantly benefits professional applications that demand stereo viewing capabilities.

Unified driver Architecture

Quadro GPUs provide several additional features and benefits for professional optimization and certification in applications.

Application Optimization

Quadro works closely with all workstation application developers that include Alias, Adobe, Autodesk, Avid, Bentley, Dassault, Discreet, Multigen-Paradigm, Newtek, Nothing Real, Parametric Technology Corp. (PTC), SDRC, Softimage, SolidEdge, SolidWorks, and Unigraphics, and it ensures that every application takes full advantage of the features provided by GPUs and that performance of graphics drivers are fully optimized.

Certification

Quadro drivers undergo rigorous in-house quality and regression testing with various workstation applications. By testing new workstation drivers against numerous applications, higher quality drivers can be released.

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