| #1. Posted at 11:19 AM on Nov 10th 2008 | Edit Reply |
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cegras |
I've always wondered what is the exact difference between these cards and their consumer counterparts?
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#1, The ridiculous price.
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Joerdgs
(#12)
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#13, Buuuut...can it fold?
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eitje
(#16)
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#23, Sigh.... sad but true
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moose17145
(#26)
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Ryu Connor |
This card clearly needs a 32bit OS.
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kilkennycat |
Recession... recession.... what recession?
These products are virtually recession-proof and have a huge profit-margin for nVidia. Advanced R&D always goes on even in a recession, and it is to those high-tech industries and academic institutions than this product-family are targeted. The double-precision data- paths/computation-cores in the GT200 ( the first with DP in any GPU family), together with the massively-parallel compute-acceleration offered to applications developers by the CUDA toolset, make these products an essential element in advanced scientific or engineering research, regardless of whether they are used for graphics imaging or not. Having powerful desktop computation available instead of waiting in line on a central server can be a huge time-saver. |
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UberGerbil |
I haven't had any reason to look at pro cards in quite a few years now, but back in the day the OpenGL drivers for them didn't include any of the usual "approximations/optimizations" that the gaming-oriented drivers featured. That meant they ran slower, but they were more accurate. I remember seeing screen shots of the same complex hull rendered on both the consumer and pro drivers, and you could see the gaps between triangles on the one rendered with the consumer drivers. That's not going to matter for gaming and not even for video work, but if you're doing architectural/engineering work you definitely don't want any corners cut.
How true that still is I don't know, but I wouldn't want to be the design firm on the hook for extra time and materials because something didn't fit together in real life that looked like it would on the model. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/gehry.html |
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zqw |
Generally, tested/certified drivers for pro apps, and very good support. Both of which can be worth the extra cost at a big shop. There are also a few niche hardware features that get enabled such as 2-sided lighting, line AA, and hardware overlays. In the case of Maya (which I use), these features have long been replaced so "normal" graphics cards (like in laptops) work well.
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