Quadro for rendering ?

Many professional artist have heard already of the benefits of Quadro GPU’s for rending.
Functions such as

  • double precision
  • Cherry picked
  • More V RAM
    etc.

But are features such as double precision are even used by blender or does it just offer the benefit of 16GB VRAM for blender users.
Also quadro cost quite a lot, so are they at all worth the huge price tag, not everybody has 5000$ just like that.

Cycles, like most GPU renderers are single precision, so for rendering Quadros are not worth the extra $. That and they come out slower than GTX when benchmarked. Mostly this is because of the drivers, Quadro drivers are tuned for OpenGL and double precision, GTX driver are tuned for gaming and single precision.

I had a quadro at work for a while, and they are not the powerhouses the marketing literature would have you believe. It ran slower than a card that cost 20% of it’s price. Not worth it for this application.

Hallo All,

I’m going to buy a new laptop for blender work, means only for rendering and no gaming (one of these: http://www.dell.com/de/p/alienware-17-r2/pd) but our admin advised me that I should build a workstation with one of the Quadro graphic cards.

After research I read everywhere, that there wouldn’t be any advantage using a Quadro in comparison with a regular GTX, as blender uses CUDA and not openGL, but I found a benchmark in the internet which proofs, that the Quadro K5200 has a better score than the GTX 980. http://www.bilder-upload.eu/thumb/eeb5f2-1428077152.jpg (provider: http://www.tomshardware.de/geforce-quadro-workstation-grafikkarte-gpu,testberichte-241759-3.html)

How does this come?? Is the Quadro K5200 really better than the GTX 980?

Many thanks for your help.

but I found a benchmark in the internet which proofs, that the Quadro K5200 has a better score than the GTX 980.
It shows no such thing.

What it does show is that the scene took 30% longer to render with the K5200 than with the GTX980, backing up what has been stated previously in this thread.

Sorry I misunderstood the diagram. It’s stated that the values are seconds and not scores. That means less is better in this case. How does it come that a Quadro M6000 is faster than a GTX 980, although everybody said that a quadro is slower because it’s not optimized for CUDA?

Thank you.

Because the quadro M6000 has more cuda cores and you will have to sell a kidney to buy one.
Alternatively you could get the Titan X for even better performance.

You will not get the best performance per dollar with the quadro.

The Quadro M6000 is available from newegg.com for roughly $5000.00 US. For that kind of money you could almost buy 5 Titan Xs. :slight_smile: Or maybe only two with a very nice computer to put them in. Nice monitor included.

The quadro uses an diffrent architecture, the optizimation of this GPU is important.
For example for a short period of time the 780 has been faster in rendering than a 980, only because the 900 series was not yet optimized eventhough the 980 is much stronger. (by now 980 is much faster, opt. )

CUDA is distributed computing, quadro and tesla GPUs are all around CUDA. Quadro always have the most extended functions for CUDA, but in day to day use, these extra functions will not be called, but some people need them, and they will pay a lot for it.
For Blender Don’t go with Quadro, eventhough i asked the Q :), i did my research

Just go with a gaming card, since games do vector mult. and Matrix Mult. all the time, just like Blender does when rendering. So the workload is about the same just that blenders shaders are much much more complex creating a nicer render at time cost. (Comparing to an game engine)