Test: 7 PCI Express 3D Pro graphic cards (page 1: Introduction)

Introduction

For many years now, ATI and NVIDIA have released all general public GPU in professional versions. These releases have tended to overshadow the specialized solutions. NVIDIA became the undisputed leader in this market, followed from afar by its competitor ATI. 3DLabs and SGI are also survivors of this industry and continue to release solutions for professional 3D. However, the market shares of these solutions are constantly on the downturn. How long can they continue to exist?

Not so long go, the requirement for a professional graphic card was to process as much polygon as possible. Requirements are changing however. Recent applications have been constantly improving the resulting quality, and have begun using pixel shaders. But SGI doesn’t offer any graphic card capable of processing pixel shaders and 3DLabs appears to have performance issues on this level. Unfortunately, we were unable to verify this as we couldn’t get hold of the last Wildcat from 3DLabs. There is one important factor in this transition, SGI now uses ATI’s GPU in several of their computers.

Development costs for recent graphic processors are so high that it has now become less and less profitable to develop a processor for a single niche market, such as the professional market. ATI and NVIDIA, which have a high level of productivity for the general public, have therefore decided to offer the same chips to professionals. This new offer has considerably reduced “professional” graphic costs. Of course, in time, some necessary optimizations, specific to professional applications, have been made. This is why ATI and NVIDIA use different denominations for the general public (Radeon and GeForce) and for the professionals (FireGL and Quadro): the aim is to clearly underline the two products´ basic differences. Could this be seen as another way of increasing the invoice?

The price

The first and easiest difference to spot is the price of the professional version of a GPU. ATI and NVIDIA have considerably reduced professional graphic accelerator prices, but still make more profit out of these products than with their other solutions. There are three reasons for this price gap:

Professional graphic cards are used in very expensive workstations (several thousand to several tens of thousands of dollars). Profits generated by these workstations are naturally much higher. And so, it is perfectly logical that ATI and NVIDIA want to adapt their profits. Several options and optimizations have been made and can only be activated for the FireGL and Quadro, in order to protect this market. These users also respond to productivity gains rather than quality/price ratios.

The other explanation is that professional graphic cards require additional developments for drivers, whether for the integration of several functions designed for professional applications, or the optimization of the same applications. This development has a price and this is only applied to the professional graphic cards.

Finally, the graphic card market requires a very high level of reliability whether for display purposes, or for the actual graphic card function. This implies more advanced validation tests and higher security margins than for general public products, as well as efficient and fast support in case of hardware or software problems. ATI and NVIDIA provide this type of support. NVIDIA maintains that they provide a better service but ATI vigorously denies it. Unfortunately it isn’t possible to cast a vote in favor of ATI or NVIDIA at this point.