VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Sep 11 2006 - 11:34:32 CDT

David,
  Unless you get the highest model Quadro cards, you'll find that the
performance is actually likely to be lower than with the less expensive
cards when you're not using stereo. For stereo the Quadro cards are
the way to go, but if you have a need for fast cards that don't have to do
stereo, then the GeForce 7800 cards are much cheaper, and often faster
than the Quadro cards. The Quadro cards previously lagged behind the GeForce
cards in terms of the internal GPU architecture as NVidia seems to do
their initial development work on the commodity cards, which gets debugged
and eventually works its way up into their professional cards later
on after a maturation period. NVidia's Qudro cards do have better support
for features like clipping planes, two-sided lighting, really large textures,
multi-pass rendering and other things than the commodity cards do, IIRC.
If you need stereo, then the Quadro cards are the way to go.
If you can live without stereo, then you could probably pick up a
GeForce 79x0 card and get higher average case rendering performance
for less money. You'll want to dig into the details and compare the
pricing you can get on the Quadro and GeForce models. We're using
GeForce cards on the majority of our desktops here. We have Quadro cards
only in the machines that need to support stereo.

  John

On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 02:11:58PM +1000, David Chalmers wrote:
> Dear list,
>
> I am in the process of ordering some workstations for molecular modelling.
> We use VMD and also the Sybyl, Schrodinger packages and a range of other
> stuff. Apart from stereo output, are there significant advantages in
> getting a more expensive professional series card (eg Nvidia Quadro FX 1400)
> over a consumer series card (eg Leadtek PX7800GT)? If so, can anyone
> suggest what they are?
>
> Regards
>
> David
>
> ____________________________________________________________________________
>
> David Chalmers Lab: 9903 9110
> Victorian College of Pharmacy Fax: 9903 9582
> 381 Royal Pde, Parkville, Vic 3053. Australia
> David.Chalmers_at_vcp.monash.edu.au
> ____________________________________________________________________________
>
> 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
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Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349
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