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Nvidia Quadro 4000 appears on Apple Online Store (USA) [EDIT 3 Nov 12: Pulled again!]
- Thread starter DualShock
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On the surface this card sounds nice if/when it is officially released it may be a good option for me as I use 3ds max, revit and autocad on windows. Any ideas if this will outperform the 5870 or if as per usual osx drivers for the card will suck?
I wouldn't even bet coffee money on this thing outperforming the 5870 at ANYTHING under OS X. It'll be nice for some folks dual-booting to run certain apps (such as yourself), but if you're looking to speed up Aperture/Maya/C4D/Motion/Blender/Houdini/whatever under OS X, it's a colossal waste of money.
This, the Quadro is not a consumer class GPU, hence it will do *very* poorly in games or other consumer stuff. It will shine in dedicated computing servers and/or clusters.
However, seeing as it is gone now, I wonder if nVidia will ever restock them.
The quadro is a workstation graphics card and if you get a macpro, you're not exactly in the market to play games.
For servers and clusters refer to the tesla series.
Yes:
Page not found.
Also, a search for "nvidia" on the U.S. Apple store site shows "1-3 of 2 results found".
I'll update the thread title.
Let's see, nVidia's main market is the workstation GPUs, as these are the most expensive and given their GPGPU push across all their products (even consumer GPUs). Also, we have Tesla and other things along the workstation class line. So it's in nVidia's best interest to keep the stock on workstation class GPUs much more stocked than a consumer product. Mind you, the current GTX400 series are the laughing stock of the tech world due to their obsencely high TDPs and energy consumption for an almost 6% increase (10% at most) performance as the 6+ month old GPU competitor.
I didn't need to tell you this because I thought you were smart enough to figure this out on your own. How terribly wrong I was.
Well in all fairness, at the time of the 2010 Mac Pro's release, the 5770 and 5870 were current, top-end ATI parts - contrast that with GPU options in the past, which have all been at least a generation behind. And the 5870 doesn't have a 6000 series successor yet.
I hope you realise that the money is in high-volume low performance chips for people like dell, HP, Apple laptops, etc?
High-End GPUs do not bring the money in, even less so on the workstation front.
But im sure you knew that, right?
I guess not, he went ranting about gaming when the macpro is a workstation and claiming the quadro cards were only good for servers, nah not really.
To clarify him, quadro cards are only used client side, for servers and clusters only tesla cards are used, for what the heck do you need a huge framebuffer and optimized open gl drivers on a cluster or server anyways if all the visualization is done client side? Well servers, clusters (...) you offload the processes on them, that's why you use processing cards like the tesla series or the cell cards.
Plus wasn't the gtx280 sold at a loss back when it was launched?
So there goes the argument for high profit on high end parts.
Teslas are used in many workstations. There are a lot of workstations even sold around the Tesla. Some Teslas won't even fit in a server form factor...
Teslas are actually awesome at CUDA on workstations. You'd use them for applications like Premiere Pro, when you wanted killer CUDA performance, but were ok with a consumer card for OpenGL.
Given the lack of optimized Quadro drivers on the Mac, a Tesla as a second card would actually be a way better choice (if Tesla on Mac was supported.)
Honestly, I'm not really sure what the point of Quadro on the Mac is. It's a weak OpenGL card compared to the competition, and there is far more demand for Teslas.
No one said that you couldn't put a tesla card on workstation, even I have one, although I have to boot centos in order to use it and feed it externally (points at sig). Ho and most of the times, if not all, a tesla card gets put inside a workstation is because there isn't cluster available to offload your processes.
Well quadro cards perform poorly on mac due to the drivers being weak. Well dam, open gl 4 is out and apple didn't yet put out full open gl 3.0.
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How terribly wrong you indeed are!
Nvidia doesn't make its money with workstation/server cards.
The mass market is where the money sits, and that is OEM hardware and consumer products.
You are wrong actually. The only one of their four main divisions making a profit is the PSB one which is Quadros and Tesla cards.
Do you have a recent source for that? I recall reading some years ago that Nvidia actually doesn't make any money with their "pro" lineup.Did this really completely change during the last couple of years?
Did this really completely change during the last couple of years?
It is all in Nvidia's financial statements.
