Workstation vs. Gaming Video Cards

Workstation vs. Gaming Video Cards

What is the difference and how to correctly choose between the two.

Due to our extreme flexibility when choosing any system type, we give customers all the options when it comes to selection parts.  While in most instances this is good, there are instances where this can be bad.  One instance of this is our selection of gaming video cards in our workstation configurators.  Because of this, we at AVADirect have a hard time recommending a Quadro or FirePro workstation card when a gaming video card has the same specs for a fraction of the price.  Thus our customers are configuring systems not perfectly suited for the intended system purpose.  This guide will aim to show what is the difference between gaming and workstation cards.

What Are The Overall Differences Between Gaming and Workstation Video Cards

To the naked eye, gaming and workstation cards look exactly the same physically.  Hardware wise, workstation cards usually have more memory (sometimes as high as 4x) and usually slower clock speeds (to lower temperatures and increase stability).  The main difference is support and the drivers that make these cards work.  I will explain in detail below.

 

	Workstation Video Card	Gaming Video Card
Physical:	Workstation video cards never deviate away from the reference designs created by NVidia and ATI.  Unlike the gaming cards where manufacturers have actually create the circuit board and make the card, workstation cards come direct from NVidia and ATI and the reseller cannot change them in any way shape or form.	Gaming video cards are actually designed and created by the manufacturer that sells them.  Thus the manufacturer has free reign to change the GPU cooler (many do), add any designs they want, or make custom models with liquid cooling or any other options as they please.
Clock speeds:	Clock speeds on these workstation cards are usually lower than the reference clock speeds of similar gaming video cards (core, shader, and memory).  While this lowers overall performance compared to similar gaming card, it also lowers temperatures and greatly increases stability.	Gaming cards usually are clocked at the stated reference speeds for 2-3 months after initial release date.  After about that time, manufacturers generally release "superclocked" editions which have about a 5% - 10% bump in clock speeds.  These are tested for stability, but you cannot be 100% certain.
Memory:	Workstations usually are used to edit very large data files, so memory on these workstation cards usually start at 512MB on the low-end to as high as 4GB on the high-end of spectrum.	To keep framerates up, textures and other memory hogging game-related features are generally not overused.  Thus memory on these cards are usually around 512MB - 1GB for high-end cards.
Color Output:	The color output of these workstation cards are usually between 24-bit and 32-bit per color (total of 96 to 128 bits).  This means that a total of 3.40 x 10^38 colors can be shown.  For anyone not familiar with scientific notation, that number above has a "34" at the beginning with 37 more zeros following that.	While many gaming cards claim to have full 128-bit color support, the fact is that this is disable and many of the cards utilize 32-bit color to increase framerates.
Drivers:	This is where the differences are major and minor at the same time.  While 99% of the driver code is the same, it is the 1% that provides the difference.  These drivers are optimized for OpenGL and clipping regions (windows on top of 3D content).	Drivers for the gaming cards are designed to get the maximum amount of frame rates possible.  This means that images may not be rendered correctly, colors may be approximated, and extra features such as AA x32 are not available.
Support:	Support for these cards are simply amazing.  Every customer is treated like a VIP and the OEM (NVidia  or ATI) will work as hard as possible to fix any problem.  This means advanced replacement, specialized driver enhancement, the works.	Support for gaming cards are regulated to second-tier support via message boards and email.  Very rarely will you talk to someone directly on the phone about a problem.  Issues with games and drivers will usually be answered with such canned responses such as "wait for a driver update".
Other Features:	Due to the specialized drivers and hardware, there are many more enhancements for workstation cards than gaming cards: Frame locking - Allows the display channels from multiple workstations to be synchronized, thus creating one large "virtual display" that can be driven by a multisystem cluster for performance scalability. SDI support - Serial Digital Interface refers to the family of transmissions used in broadcast environments Higher resolutions - Specialized output hardware allows resolutions as high as 3840 x 2400. More outputs - Specialized cards can drive up to 4 displays at once.	Extra features only relate to gaming such as 3D stereo vision and game physics enhancements.

What Are the Performance Differences Between Workstation and Gaming Cards

In this section, I will not be showing game frame rates.  Instead I will be showing benchmarking scores that relate to workstation professional applications.

 

Performance Comparison: Viewperf 10
	Nvidia GeForce GTX 280	Nvidia Quadro FX 4800
Chip	GT200	GT200
Driver	182.08	182.08
Graphics RAM	1,024 MB	1,536 MB
Core clock	650 MHz	600 MHz
Memory clock	1,150 MHz	800 MHz
Shader clock	1,300 MHz	1,200 MHz
3ds Max-04 (3D Studio Max)	11.53	46.23
catia-02	15.22	57.95
ensight-03	18.34	54.47
maya-02	35.71	221.71
proe-04 (Pro/Engineer)	14.72	60.59
sw-01 (Solidworks)	12.94	128.71
tcvis-01 (UGS Teamcenter Visualization)	4.77	39.36
ugnx-01 (UGS NX)	5.89	33.72

Using the benchmarks in Viewperf 10, a benchmark utility maintained by SPEC, you can clearly see that the Quadro workstation card offers much higher scores than the Geforce gaming card.  Even though the workstation card has lower clock speeds, the optimized drivers and greater memory played a huge role in greater performance.

While some may argue that the performance to cost ratio is not worth it, to a company where extra seconds in rendering time mean money lost, it is more than worth it.  Thus it makes no sense to use a dedicated gaming card when using these 3D CAD and DCC applications.

How To Choose the Correct Graphics Card For My Application

How do you decide if your application needs a gaming or workstation card?  Basically the rule is simple, if you are creating content or using any type of application that is not simply displaying 3D content onto a single screen, then you must use a workstation card for the best reliability and performance.

If your application needs fall under one of the following categories, this listing will help you select the best video card for your application.

3D CAD or DCC:	3D creation applications such as Solidworks, Maya, 3ds Max, etc. use the most commonly named workstation cards: NVidia Quadro FX or ATI FirePro.
Multi-Display (1):	For simulators or image generator systems which require multiple screens to output at exactly the same time, NVidia Quadro FX models with frame-lock capabilities are recommended.
Multi-Display (2):	For business applications that require 2D acceleration or using multiple monitors on a single system, the best cards to use are:  NVidia Quadro NVS or ATI FireMV.
GPGPU Applications:	GPGPU applications run directly on the GPU instead of the CPU.  Depending upon which programming language was used, you have two selections:  NVidia Tesla for CUDA applications or ATI FireStream for Brook applications.
Application Specific:	Sometimes, there are applications which require a total redo of the driver and hardware to get the maximum hardware acceleration.  Two examples of this are the NVidia Quadro CX for Adobe CS4 and NVidia Quadro VX 200 for Autodesk AutoCAD.