Wed May 31, 2017 6:48 pm
I was put off buying into Nvidia GRID and Teslas, simply because of the ridiculous markup, and I repeatedly mention that after 12 years of working in a professional CAD environment with a bolt-on VFX department, that the difference between workstation/server cards and consumer cards are vastly overrated for all but the Nichey-McNicheface of software.
Most recently was a mid-2016 in-house test of our four current primary software packages from Autodesk, Dassault, McNeel and Bentley. Geforce 980 vs Quadro M4000 vs a (borrowed) Tesla K20. Results were exactly as expected and reaffirm the decision I made in 2009 to convince our beancounters/directors to switch to consumer GPUs. We kept the M4000 last year to complement the W7000 and Cayman-based FirePro - just so that if there's a graphics/render issue we can rule out the consumer GPUs as the fault. Interestingly their output isn't always identical but it's 50/50 whether the problem lies with the pro card or the consumer card! Annoyingly, we bought a batch of 750Ti cards for meeting room PCs and the 1st Gen maxwell (GM107) is practically useless as a professional card, something that 2nd gen Maxwell (970 and 980 cards) don't suffer from. Largely though, we stick to AMD because GCN has proven to be highly compatible, the display drivers are generally better-behaved, and most importantly of all, you can get them in larger VRAM configurations than the equivalent-cost Geforce.
The irony is that we've had fewer issues with the consumer cards than the professional cards overall, and even though the support is better, it generally isn't satisfactory. My hunch is that expensive software is optimised by the developers for the widest range of hardware, so unsurprisingly they're targeting DirectX/OpenGL basic feature sets and ensuring maximum compatibility with laptops rather than limiting their market to "people with $4000 graphics cards".
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