Shootouts

CUDA for Professionals - NVIDIA's Newest Quadro GPUs

By Vincent Chang - 30 Jan 2009

Results - SPECviewperf 10.0

Results - SPECviewperf 10.0

If you ever wondered what a workstation class GPU is worth, well the results for SPECviewperf 10.0 spoke a thousand words. All the four workstation cards we tested scored significantly higher than the Zotac GeForce GTX 260 consumer graphics card (which is actually better spec'd than most of the Quadro cards). Even the Sapphire FireGL card, which is a couple of generations behind the GTX 200, was significantly better than the Zotac GeForce GTX 260. This goes to show the kind of difference you can get with performance optimization done on the professional series of graphics cards (which is mostly driver tweaking to be frank, but it does wonders).

Although the Sapphire was behind the Quadro cards for almost all the tests here, it was not as outmatched as we would have expected given the generation gap. Another interesting result was that the top Quadro FX 5800 did not have much of a performance lead over the other Quadros. With the huge 4GB frame buffer, the Quadro FX 5800 would best shine when workloads call upon this vast memory, drowning out its competition and the other Quadro cards. So it's really designed for a different purpose altogether and thus won't see stark difference in these tests.

Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.