Hacker News Reader

Comment by jon_richards | Hacker News Reader

I've always been amazed by this chart http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

I'm sure some of those expensive cards have extra features, but the pricing differences are still crazy.

A big part of what you're paying for with the workstation-grade cards (EG Quadro/FirePro) is certification. If you're using many "serious" applications like 3D CAD, you must be using a certified (e.g. not consumer grade) card to be fully supported. They run fine on the consumer cards - but don't expect support.

And as it happens, the companies that specialize in cad support will use every opportunity to shove these overpriced cards down your throat. As far as I've understood their business model, they earn almost nothing from selling licenses, so they live on their maintenance contracts and selling Quadro/Fire cards.

Meanwhile we have no problems with an office running on 950Ms and 780/980 GTXes, except for some weird driver bugs that only occur on the single Quadro machine that we keep for reference.

No artificial benchmark is perfect, but if I had to pick one I'd prefer 3DMark from Futuremark: https://www.futuremark.com/hardware/gpu

AFAICT, PassMark's GPU benchmarks are most often used simply because it's usually the first Google result for "video card benchmark".

I know that synthetic tests only mean so much, but are these scorings roughly linear? I'm just kind of bluesy away at a ten times difference in power over my laptop's card. I guess it's been a while since I've had a desktop, or bought a demanding game for that matter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com