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Workstation vs Desktop GPUs. Is a High End Gaming GPU Good Enough for Content Creation?

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Gamers who want to dabble in content creation or make a career out of it often find themselves at odds with the price tags on high end workstation GPUs. "They're the same core," they mutter, wondering why workstation GPUs are so much more expensive than their sometimes higher-specced desktop counterparts.

Icrontic pit the best against the best: The ATI Radeon HD 5870 against the ATI FirePro V8750, and ran them through the gamut of workstation benchmarks. The results may surprise you.
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icrontic.com
primesuspect - contributor
Published: 40 days ago | Article | Tech
 
 

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UPSLynx - 40 days 2 hours ago
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When I tested the 8800GTX against the v8750, I totally expected the workstation GPU to blow it out of the water.... and it did.

When I put the HD5870 up against the v8750, I thought I'd see close numbers. I would have never guess such incredibly high gains would come from the simple move to a workstation board. The tests blew my mind.

As an artist, I'll never again consider buying high-end desktop GPU over a workstation GPU for graphics work.
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JOLLY1 - 40 days 2 hours ago
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I use a quadro fx3800 and I love it. The weird thing is, I was talking with one of the content creators from Bungie, they use gaming graphics cards. I just found that odd. He said it had to do with the fill rate.
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Raf1k1 - 40 days 1 hour ago
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Yeh that's definitely odd.
I'd have thought all established developers would be using workstation GPUs.
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Kakkoii - 40 days ago
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The sad thing is it's purely drivers your paying for. Nvidia/ATI keep the CAD acceleration out of the gaming GPU drivers, and make you pay a huge ass premium for them by buying what they call a workstation card, which in reality is just an increased RAM gaming GPU.

You can still do a driver patch to install FireGL/Pro drivers on ATI Radeon cards, turning them into workstation cards. But Nvidia has locked people out from doing that at the hardware level since just after the 8000 series.

I had installed workstation drivers for the hardware equivalent of my old x1650pro, and it's perfSPEC scores went up around 10x.

There's patches for up to the HD4000 series already. Just google around. Will save you a TONNE of money.
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