Informed power users know that professional graphics cards center on the same hardware architectures used to drive gaming boards. That fact alone is enough to create skepticism about the value of buying an ATI FirePro- or Nvidia Quadro FX-branded product. However, as we showed last year, there is substantially more to a workstation graphics card than its GPU. (See page 20 in the July 2008 issue of CPU.)
As a quick recap, software is perhaps the most significant differentiator. When it comes to running games, drivers for your Radeon and GeForce boards are quickly optimized to shore up image quality, stability, and performance. But if you’re looking to do a little animation in 3ds Max, modeling in Maya, or mechanical CAD in SolidWorks, a workstation graphics card with drivers written specifically for those professional applications is a must-have. If you’re still not a believer, read on. The benchmarks speak for themselves.
Contrary to popular thought, though, there are some significant hardware features available on workstation cards that you can’t get on their gaming equivalents. Display connectivity is one good example. Hopefully you’ve already discovered the improvement in picture quality moving from analog VGA to the DVI output found on the vast majority of mainstream cards. Although desktop boards still rely heavily on DVI technology, the professional cards in this roundup overwhelmingly favor DisplayPort—an interface designed to replace VGA and DVI. A smaller, simpler connector and support for longer cables are only two of the reasons to use DisplayPort on your workstation.
There are also a number of value-adds in play. For example, Nvidia’s latest generation of cards expounds on SLI by adding three additional operating modes: SLI Multi-OS, SLI FSAA, and SLI Mosaic mode. The first lets you assign hardware compute resources to different virtual machines running on a hardware platform with multiple Quadro FX cards. Sadly, the feature is only enabled on certain HP workstations right now, putting it out of reach of DIY power users. SLI FSAA combines the muscle of two Quadros, facilitating higher levels of antialiasing without a negative performance impact. SLI Mosaic mode is only available on Nvidia’s Quadro Plex 2200 D2, which uses a pair of GPUs to drive a quartet of displays as a single logical graphics device.
ATI’s FirePro lineup uniquely offers DirectX 10.1 support—notable because an increasing number of professional titles have actually shifted away from OpenGL rendering in favor of DirectX. The company’s flagship FirePro V8700 is the only board equipped with stereo 3D output; additionally, it’s the only model armed with HD component output. Compared to Nvidia’s lineup, which is loaded with unique capabilities depending on the card you choose, ATI is drilling down on performance as its primary differentiator.
FirePro V8700
$1,499
ATI
www.amd.com
CPU Rating: 3
 Serving as the flagship of ATI’s FirePro workstation family, the V8700 centers on the same silicon used to manufacture Radeon HD 4870 graphics cards. Its RV770 XT GPU is etched at 55nm and sports 800 shader processors, 40 texture units, and 16 ROPs. Like the card’s desktop variant, the FirePro V8700 is armed with 1GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit bus. ATI sets the GPU clock speed at 750MHz (the same as the Radeon HD 4870) and the memory frequency to 850MHz—just 50MHz slower.
The hardware similarities don’t stop there, as ATI’s FirePro V8700 populates two expansion slots and requires a pair of six-pin PCI-E power connectors. Although the fully enclosed blower-type cooler looks identical to what we’ve seen on Radeon-class desktop cards, it runs substantially quieter, even under heavy load.
Despite the pair of CrossFireX connectors on the board, however, AMD’s not advertising its multi-GPU rendering technology as a feature this time around; the complexities of enabling CrossFire in windowed applications presents too many issues.
Physical evidence that this card is designed for a different audience is most apparent on its rear I/O panel, which sports a single dual-link DVI output, two DisplayPort outputs, and a stereo 3D connector (although only two of the digital outputs can be active at a time).
FirePro V5700
$599
ATI
www.amd.com
CPU Rating: 4.5
 It's difficult not to draw parallels between the FirePro V5700 and Radeon HD 4670, which sells for less than $100. Both cards center on ATI’s RV730 graphics processor, with its 320 stream processors, 24 texture units, and 12 ROPs. And both cards feature 512MB of GDDR3 memory on a 128-bit bus.
But many of the Radeon HD 4670s we’ve seen include two dual-link DVI ports and an S-Video TV output. The FirePro V5700 boasts a single dual-link DVI output and two DisplayPort connectors. It’s a single-slot card that gets all the power it needs from the PCI-E slot—no need for an auxiliary connector. Although you’ll find a pair of CrossFire connectors on the top edge of the card, ATI’s multi-GPU rendering technology isn’t enabled on the FirePro V5700.
Like the FirePro V8700, this model’s cooler runs significantly quieter than its desktop equivalent. A side-by-side visual inspection makes it easy to see why. Whereas the reference Radeon HD 4670 employs an aluminum heatsink that does not make contact with onboard memory ICs, the FirePro card features a beefier copper sink able to keep temperatures lower. Thus, less is required from the fan.
FirePro V3750
$199
ATI
www.amd.com
CPU Rating: 4
 The FirePro V3750 is a particularly noteworthy product in ATI’s workstation lineup because its price comes very close to overlapping the Radeon HD 4890. Yet, from a hardware perspective, the FirePro V3750 is a substantially less-powerful offering. It centers on RV730, the same 320 stream processor-equipped GPU used on the aforementioned V5700. By comparison, the Radeon HD 4890 boasts 800 stream processors. Nevertheless, the fact that our benchmark suite results show this modest little board blowing past Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 295 gaming flagship should be a good indicator of the impact driver optimizations can have in the professional graphics market.
If the FirePro V3750 employs the same silicon as ATI’s V5700, why is that latter board $400 more expensive? For starters, the V3750 hosts half as much memory—256MB of GDDR3 instead of 512MB. The V3750 also sacrifices the HD component video output.
But other than that, the sub-$200 board is a fairly strong card for value-oriented professionals who’d like to get into workstation graphics at desktop prices. It offers the same dual-link DVI output and DisplayPort connectors, the same single-slot design, and the same heatsink as the FirePro V5700. And because it also uses the V5700’s GPU, its performance attributes turn out to be fairly similar, so long as you aren’t working on large, memory-intensive datasets.
FirePro V3700
$99
ATI
www.amd.com
CPU Rating: 2
 The least-expensive board in ATI’s current stable of pro products is actually the only one not based on this generation’s graphics hardware. Its name makes it sound very similar to the previously discussed V3750, but the V3700 is actually based on ATI’s RV620, wielding just 40 stream processors, eight texture units, and four ROPs.
The older architecture naturally translates to reduced performance. But because it does employ ATI’s heavily optimized unified driver package, the $99 card is able to compete against more expensive desktop boards repurposed for workstation tasks. ATI outfits the sub-$100 board with a pair of dual-link DVI outputs and a super-quiet copper heatsink. Both features are atypical of low-cost graphics cards, so there is real value in stepping up to professional hardware, even an entry-level model such as the V3700.
Nevertheless, we’d be inclined to skip over this one; you could get the much better FirePro V3750 for $100 more. Our performance tests tell the real tale here.
Quadro FX 3800
$899
Nvidia
www.nvidia.com
CPU Rating: 4.5
 Sitting in the middle of Nvidia’s workstation lineup (but still considered a high-end part), the Quadro FX 3800 is an impressive adaptation of the company’s desktop hardware. It’s powered by a GT200 GPU loaded with 192 shader cores—identical to the GeForce GTX 260—but the card gets away with a single-slot design that’s remarkably quiet. Although the resulting I/O backplate doesn’t leave much room for connectivity, you still get a pair of DisplayPort outputs and a dual-link DVI connector. A 256-bit bus hosting 1GB of GDDR3 would seem to set this card up against ATI’s FirePro V8700, which is considerably more expensive.
But more exciting than the graphics processor driving Nvidia’s Quadro FX 3800 is the feature and software packages the company enables. To begin, this is the least expensive board with support for an optional SDI (Serial Digital Interface) card, used in video production. It’s also the most affordable board from Nvidia with SLI Multi-OS support (if you own a compatible HP workstation) and stereoscopic output. Additionally, Nvidia is in the process of equipping its Quadro FX 3800 with functionality once reserved for the pricey Quadro CX: GPU-accelerated video encoding via a software plugin for Adobe’s Premiere Pro CS4.
By giving its $899 card capabilities that were once only available on ultra high-end workstation products, Nvidia makes this one of the most attractive offerings in its Quadro family.
Quadro FX 1800
$599
Nvidia
www.nvidia.com
CPU Rating: 3.5
 Stepping down to the Quadro FX 1800 saves $300, but it also reverts to Nvidia’s previous-generation architecture, which only has 64 shader processors and FP32 precision (32-bit floating point precision) vs. the Quadro FX 3800, which offers FP64. A narrower 192-bit memory bus with 768MB of GDDR3 scales performance back even further.
Beyond what you lose in speed, the Quadro FX 1800 also gives up support for SLI and optional SDI connectivity. It does enjoy the Premiere Pro CS4 driver upgrade, though, making this $599 board your low-cost option for hardware-accelerated video transcoding.
In our opinion, the price difference between this board and its GT200-based big brother shouldn’t be insurmountable for professionals vacillating between the midrange and high-end workstation markets. If you can afford the step up, we’d recommend the more capable Quadro FX 3800. Between this card and the similarly priced FirePro V5700, consider the FirePro if video acceleration isn’t at the top of your priority list and the Quadro FX 1800 if you plan to do encoding work within Adobe’s CS4 suite.
Quadro FX 580
$149
Nvidia
www.nvidia.com
CPU Rating: 2.5
 The Quadro FX 580 is another new board based on an older graphics architecture. However, because this one slides in under $150, we expect performance concessions in the name of making workstation graphics available to as many professionals as possible. After all, this is the least expensive card in our roundup with two DisplayPort outputs and a dual-link DVI port.
Nvidia also gives the 580 512MB of GDDR3 memory on a 128-bit bus. Under frame buffer-intensive workloads, that should give the entry-level Quadro FX an advantage over ATI’s FirePro V3750, which only comes with 256MB of memory. Otherwise, there’s a good chance that the FirePro V3750 is going to be faster.
Naturally, the Quadro FX 580 sacrifices a lot of the functionality found on the 3800 and 1800 boards. But it still makes a compelling alternative to shoehorning desktop graphics into a workstation environment for the power user on a budget. Again, we see proof that it’s better to buy at the bottom of the professional stack, if only for the highly optimized drivers.
 Our Recommendations
Let’s cover the most important guidance first: There’s no such thing as substituting desktop graphics in a workstation world. The hardware might be eerily similar, but software drivers make all of the difference. ATI’s FirePro and Nvidia’s Quadro FX lineup both feature optimizations that improve performance in professional apps. It might sound ludicrous to pay $599 for the equivalent of a Radeon HD 4670, for example. Rest assured, both vendors’ entry-level boards are able to embarrass pricier gaming cards in the professional arena.
But if you can’t afford to spend any more on a workstation graphics product than you would on a desktop board, the FirePro V3750 is perhaps the strongest offering from among our sub-$200 cards.
Stepping up to the $599 price range takes you past the most expensive desktop powerhouses. ATI’s FirePro V5700 and Nvidia’s Quadro FX 1800 duke it out, both offering unique advantages. Most notable is the Premiere Pro plugin accelerating video transcoding on Nvidia’s board.
Finally, the high end is represented by the Quadro FX 3800 and FirePro V8700. The former is loaded with exciting features, such as SLI, SDI support, and video acceleration that expand the card’s potential. The latter lacks all of those extras, instead zeroing in on maximizing performance. In the end, we’re most impressed with the additions Nvidia enables through the Quadro FX 3800. That’d be the high-end board we’d choose. 
by Paul Cross
Pro Card Benchmarking
Of course, testing workstation-class graphics cards is nothing like running desktop boards through a handful of the latest games. Creating a relevant test suite requires a sample of the apps used by professionals. So, we picked SPECviewperf, SPECapc for 3ds Max, and the 64-bit version of Cinebench 10 to do the job.
SPECviewperf 10 is an OpenGL-based synthetic benchmark launched in mid-2007 by SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation). It consists of eight viewsets, each intended as a predictor of application performance in a corresponding title. SPECviewperf is widely used to compare modern workstation graphics cards. However, it faces a challenge in that a lot more emphasis is being placed on DirectX these days instead of OpenGL.
The same issue affects Cinebench 10, because its integrated graphics test runs through OpenGL. Fortunately, Cinebench is still representative of real-world performance in Maxon’s Cinema 4D animation software, so it’s less of a synthetic metric.
Our SPECapc for 3ds Max benchmark is perhaps the most interesting test. The original SPECapc package was designed for 3ds Max 9. Its workload included wireframe modeling, shading, texturing, lighting, animation, rendering, and more. But 3ds Max 9 is several versions old, so this test was updated to support 3ds Max 2009 (x64, in this case). Although the benchmark supports both OpenGL and DirectX, we did our testing with DirectX in order to shed some light on the development work now being conducted using the Microsoft API.
It’s incredibly interesting to see how each vendor dominates depending on the basis for comparison. In SPECviewperf 10, for example, AMD seems to have the upper hand. The same holds true for Cinebench. But when we move to SPECapc for 3ds Max, Nvidia takes a commanding lead. Let’s break the results down further, though, to get a better idea of how performance varies between $99 and $1,499 hardware.
| Pro Card Benchmarking | | | | | | | | | SPECViewperf 10
1,600 x 1,200, OpenGL | Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 | Nvidia Quadro FX 3800 | Nvidia Quadro FX 1800 | Nvidia Quadro FX 580 | ATI FirePro V8700 | ATI FirePro V5700 | ATI FirePro V3750 | ATI FirePro V3700 | | 3dsmax-04 | 10.75 | 46.12 | 45.88 | 39.8 | 54.67 | 54.01 | 48.1 | 34.22 | | catia-02 | 13.86 | 49.51 | 48.64 | 45.23 | 47.44 | 45.6 | 44.96 | 37.27 | | ensight-03 | 17.23 | 46.12 | 45.66 | 37.83 | 54.56 | 40.57 | 30.63 | 23.24 | | maya-02 | 40.4 | 59.8 | 59.89 | 59.8 | 254.41 | 181.21 | 147.67 | 68.45 | | proe-04 | 15.14 | 54.09 | 51.89 | 46.77 | 51.75 | 50.74 | 45.62 | 31.25 | | sw-01 | 12.6 | 59.79 | 59.9 | 55.6 | 123.75 | 111.66 | 98.92 | 54.58 | | tcvis-01 | 5.02 | 34.03 | 31.31 | 21.87 | 40.34 | 35.24 | 28.05 | 16.01 | | ugnx-01 | 5.31 | 31.94 | 29.96 | 20.65 | 56.51 | 45.16 | 33.6 | 14.89 | Cinebench R10 x64
OpenGL Standard | 6,622 | 6,809 | 6,813 | 6,312 | 9,845 | 9,128 | 8,707 | 5,194 | SPECapc
3ds Max 2009 x64 | 3.18 | 5.52 | 4.96 | 4.81 | 3.91 | 3.75 | 3.64 | 2.69 |
The SPECviewperf 10 results are reported in frames per second—easy enough to understand for any power user with a penchant for gaming. SPEC’s 3ds Max viewset heavily favors ATI’s architecture (only the $99 FirePro V3700 is beaten by any of Nvidia’s boards). The CATIA test is actually fairly even, as is the EnSight visualization workload. Maya, SolidWorks, and UGS NX are all dominated by ATI hardware. Nvidia turns in better Pro/Engineer numbers, while the UGS Teamcenter Visualization Mockup is fairly well-balanced.
Bear in mind that those are OpenGL-based scores. The tables turn as soon as we switch over to 3ds Max 2009 and its DirectX-based workload. Whereas SPECviewperf yielded comparison numbers in frames per second, our SPECapc result is actually a composite. It’s generated using the weighted geometric means of more than 50 different test cases. And the suggestion here is that all of Nvidia’s current-generation cards (even the $149 Quadro FX 580) are faster than ATI’s lineup.
Cinebench offers the exact opposite conclusion, as the FirePro V8700, V5700, and V3750 all score higher than Nvidia’s Quadro FX 3800. But again, we’re in OpenGL territory. Could it be that ATI simply has the upper hand in OpenGL, while Nvidia gets the edge in DirectX rendering right now? Absolutely, though a broader sample of tests would likely provide a more conclusive look at how these cards stack up. Most telling, however, is the performance of Nvidia’s desktop flagship, the GeForce GTX 295. Despite its overwhelming advantage in pure hardware potential (two fast GPUs, each with 896MB of memory on a single board) over every other card in this roundup, the GTX 295 gets trounced by every workstation-optimized product aside from ATI’s $99 FirePro V3700. And even then, the entry-level FirePro smacks it around in SPECviewperf. |
| Professional Graphics Spec Showcase | | | | | | | | | AMD ATI FirePro V8700 | AMD ATI FirePro V5700 | AMD ATI FirePro V3750 | AMD ATI FirePro V3700 | Nvidia Quadro FX 3800 | Nvidia Quadro FX 1800 | Nvidia Quadro FX 580 | | GPU | RV770 | RV730 | RV730 | RV620 | GT200 | G94 | G96 | | Shader processors | 800 | 320 | 320 | 40 | 192 | 64 | 32 | | Frame buffer | 1GB GDDR5 | 512MB GDDR3 | 256MB GDDR3 | 256MB GDDR3 | 1GB GDDR3 | 768MB GDDR3 | 512MB GDDR3 | | Memory bus | 256-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit | 64-bit | 256-bit | 192-bit | 128-bit | | Slot width | Dual | Single | Single | Single | Single | Single | Single | | Display outputs | 1 DVI; 2 DisplayPort | 1 DVI; 2 DisplayPort | 1 DVI; 2 DisplayPort | 2 DVI | 1 DVI; 2 DisplayPort | 1 DVI; 2 DisplayPort | 1 DVI; 2 DisplayPort | | Stereo support | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | | Price | $1,499 | $599 | $199 | $99 | $899 | $599 | $149 | | CPUs | 3 | 4.5 | 4 | 2 | 4.5 | 3.5 | 2.5 |
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