Testing Methodology, System Setup and CineBench 11/10
Testing professional graphics board is a much different beast that our reviews on consumer graphics solutions that focus nearly completely on gaming. The user interested in a Quadro or FirePro 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.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.
Also, we have included the OpenGL portion of the CineBench 10 and 11 rendering benchmark and even given 3DMark Vantage a whirl for those of you really interested in how 4GB of frame buffer affects performance.
Test System Setup |
|
CPU |
Intel Core i7-965
|
Motherboards |
ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution
|
Memory |
Corsair 3 x 2GB DDR3-1333
|
Hard Drive |
Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB
|
Sound Card |
on-board |
Video Card |
AMD FirePro V9800 4GB
AMD FirePro V8800 2GB AMD FirePro V7800 2GB NVIDIA Quadro 5000 2.5 GB |
Video Drivers |
NVIDIA Quadro 258.98
AMD FirePro 8.76.5 |
Power Supply | PC Power and Cooling 1000 watt |
DirectX Version |
DX11/ DX10
/ DX9c / OpenGL
|
Operating System |
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
We don’t yet have one of the new Quadro 6000 cards with 6GB of memory in house to compare to the 4GB V9800 but we’ll surely have a review on that product very soon.
CineBench 10 and 11
This rendering benchmark based off of the Cinema 4D engine is a terrific indicator for multi-threaded processing.



The CineBench 10 test is sorely outdated now but is included just for a reference and starting point. The CineBench 11 test shows that the FirePro V9800 has a definite performance lead over the Quadro 5000 by 44% or so.
Extra Ordinary…
Extra Ordinary…