A more recent review in Tom's Hardware pitted the new FireGL2 against a later generation nVidia chip, the Quadro2 Pro. Pro by up to 30 per cent in modelling and animation benchmarks stressing geometry processing, while often falling behind on raster-intensive tests. However, mentioned only in passing was the fact that the GeForce2 GTS game board tested with the other two tracked only slightly behind the Quadro-based board on most tests, and actually outperformed both on some 3D Max raster tests. The only differences are that Quadro-based boards enable several hardware features not available on GeForce game boards. And they're generally faster.
Some background is in order.
During the initial design, nVidia recognised that GeForce-based boards could compete in several workstation market segments by building features irrelevant to the gaming market into the chip. So it could either design a separate Quadro chip, with all the concomitant costs, or figure out how to use one chip as both Quadro and GeForce. It prudently chose the latter, using the same raw die in both chips, with different packages and pinouts. Quadro boards got the juicy workstation features, GeForce boards didn't and nobody's the wiser. Of course, nVidia adopted this strategy with minimal fanfare or explanation, but was busted when several Internet sites explained how to convert GeForce boards into Quadro boards.