Professional Graphics Roundup: NVIDIA Quadro and AMD FirePro

Testing Configuration and CineBench 10

Testing professional graphics boards is a much different beast that our reviews on consumer graphics solutions that focused nearly completely on gaming.  The user interested in a Quadro or Fire Pro card MIGHT be curious how the card performs in gaming, but in reality the decision to buy a card of this cost is based on other application performance: 3D modeling, CAD and design tools. 

My review of the Quadro CX card from NVIDIA was aimed at the professional video and image editor as that solution was directly targeted at the release of Adobe’s CS4 line of software.  In that article I looked at performance of the CX in Adobe Photoshop and in Premiere Pro with the Elemental Technologies based GPU accelerated video encoder.  So while the Quadro FX 4800 and the Quadro CX are essentially the same card under the hood, they are definitely aimed at different buyers and as such the FX 4800, along with all the cards in this review, will see different tests.

By far the most interesting tests for us with this kind of product are the SPEC series of benchmarks.  SPECviewperf has long been a staple for evaluating professional level application performance and the newest version enables us to test a multitude of results.  Applications like Maya, 3D Studio Max, SolidWorks and UGS NX are simulated as are several others; the benchmark allows us to easily test how the graphics cards help in scaling with multisampling as well as multi-threaded processing. 

I have also included a new version of the stand-alone 3D Studio Max SPECapc test that works with the latest 2009 version of the retail software.  This test runs through over 30 different scenarios and reports the time required to complete each operation.  Also, we have included the OpenGL portion of the CineBench 10 rendering benchmark and even given 3DMark Vantage a whirl for those of you really interested in out 2GB of frame buffer affects performance.

Quadro FX 4800	Quadro FX 3700
Fire Pro v8700	Fire Pro v5700

Test System Setup
CPU	Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650
Motherboards	EVGA nForce 790i Ultra SLI Motherboard
Memory	OCZ Technology 2 x 2GB DDR-1333
Hard Drive	Western Digital Raptor 150 GB – Review
Sound Card	Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value
Video Card	NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 1.5GB NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700 512MB AMD FirePro v8700 1GB AMD FirePro v5700 512MB
Video Drivers	NVIDIA Quadro 181.20 AMD FirePro 8.543
Power Supply	PC Power and Cooling 1000 watt
DirectX Version	DX10 / DX9c
Operating System	Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit

CineBench 10

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This rendering benchmark based off of the Cinema 4D engine is a terrific indicator for multi-threaded processing.