Nvidia Quadro 4000 still viable ? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Johnny10
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 04, 2017, 01:40:22 pm
content: I just picked up a server box with a Nvidia Quadro 4000 card.Just curious why these cards still hold such good value?I have only done Passmark test and find these fall at lower end of video benchmarks.I imagine they excel at Adobe products?

author: janoc
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 04, 2017, 02:55:25 pm
content: Passmark won't tell you that this card can do e.g. active stereo (driving shutter glasses) or allows frame synchronization of several cards together (genlock). Those are features that are absolutely essential for things like virtual reality or video production and the consumers cards don't have them - both ATI and Nvidia are very careful about not allowing any of this in their low cost cards.If you only look at it from the POV of a gamer using gaming/video benchmarks, Quadros usually suck - they are not tuned for those workloads. They are optimized for CAD and 3D modelling where lots of triangles have to be pushed and not really textures. CAD almost rarely uses any but models with millions of triangles are common - exactly the opposite of what games do.The Adobe suite doesn't need Quadro and it would be an expensive overkill for it - any Geforce would be sufficient to accelerate the few filters that Adobe uses.Furthermore, Quadro 4000 is really old today - some 6 years. New one goes for about $200 still. It is niche market that both ATI with their FireGL cards and Nvidia with their Quadros are milking really well. When the card was new it was going for $1200.Now why someone had a Quadro in a server I am not sure - it is a workstation card or maybe for a visualization/image generation node in a cluster (e.g. for a CAVE system or some simulator).

author: dexters_lab
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 04, 2017, 06:19:36 pm
content: there is also scientific and engineering software that will only work with quadro, sometimes they will refuse to work even with a newer gaming card with 10x the performance because it's not a quadro or they only support upto a particular generation of quadroso using an old card might be the only option, this keeps the top-of-the-line cards of a particular GPU generation at a premium

author: gnif
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 05, 2017, 01:11:26 pm
content: Quote from: janoc on April 04, 2017, 02:55:25 pmNo, many system builders (Dell, HP, etc) when they sell a desktop workstation/server they will often put a Quadro in it. The TDP and reliability of the Quadro is usually superior to the GeForce series because of the lower clock rates, better quality parts, and ECC ram, which makes sense for a server/power workstation.

author: Johnny10
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 05, 2017, 01:20:01 pm
content: Beginning to understand the difference.Thank you all for the great responses.It was from a Dell server used advertised as:Dell Precision WorkstationsPrecision is the key element that separates greatness fromeverything else. Dell Precision is your key tool whether your jobrequires you to design digital content, work with CAD models,analyze manufacturing processes or any other performanceintensive application.

author: rrinker
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 05, 2017, 01:39:49 pm
content: Yes, everything with a Xeon is not necessarily a server. On a high performance workstation it's often used so the system can use ECC memory. And/or to get the massive core counts available only in the server class CPUs.

author: janoc
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 05, 2017, 10:12:22 pm
content: Quote from: gnif on April 05, 2017, 01:11:26 pmWell, that's Dell workstations. The server machines (the rack mounted stuff) usually don't come with Quadros offered unless you put it in as a special request (and have a ton of money to blow).

author: janoc
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 05, 2017, 10:14:07 pm
content: Quote from: Johnny10 on April 05, 2017, 01:20:01 pmThat's a workstation machine - typically sold for CAD or some high end graphics intensive stuff - 3D modelling, animation, things like that. They are huge, maybe that's why you thought it was a server.I don't think anyone sane would use this kind of system as a real server - way expensive and in all the wrong places.

author: moz
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 05, 2017, 10:58:57 pm
content: Quote from: janoc on April 05, 2017, 10:14:07 pmSomething like engineering or architectural rendering where they don't put any/many textures on but they want their wireframes to be very detailed. A lot of CAD programs only work with Quattro and similar cards, but also allow you to spawn jobs off to a server (assuming you have another $10k+ license for the server - stuff like Autodesk Backburner is very "if you have to ask you can't afford it").Also, I suspect specific stages of and animation render farm can use those cards for acceleration, and bang for buck it works. I'd look at someone like Weta for that kind of pipelined setup rather than your local animation house, though.

author: janoc
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 06, 2017, 09:44:37 am
content: Quote from: moz on April 05, 2017, 10:58:57 pmNone of that actually uses (or even can use) a Quadro. AutoCAD, Inventor, 3DS Max or Maya use the GPU only for the real time drawing of the UI/model and previewing. The benefit of a Quadro there is making the software responsive, even when displaying the massive CAD models. However, all this software runs just fine with a GeForce or Radeon, no Quadro is necessary unless you want to use the stereoscopic previews (shutter glasses) that some of this software supports.Software like Catia or AutoCAD hascertifiedhardware requirements include a Quadro. However, thatdoes notmean that it won't run on anything else. It only means you will be running an unsupported configuration and in case of problems Dassault may just say "Sorry, you need to buy our overpriced bundle from DELL". That's also why Nvidia has two types of drivers on their website - certified ones, which are always a bit old but are verified to work with this big CAD/3D software and normal ones.OTOH, if you are licensing Catia, then a $4000 graphic card is likely not the biggest expense ...The actual "production" rendering is always done in software, using a much more complex algorithm. These rendering servers/farms using Backburner or similar use offline rendering using this "production" renderer, at best they can use some GPU acceleration for the math. Typical examples are things like MentalRay for Autodesk products or Renderman used by the movie industry (Pixar). Weta uses their own Manuka renderer, which is again, a software renderer.If the GPU is used with these then it is as a parallel computer for speeding up calculations (like when used for Bitcoin mining or SETI), not to actually draw any images. The rendering model used by something like Renderman or MentalRay is much more complex than what a typical game or real time rendering would use and what Direct3D or OpenGL are designed to handle. The calculations can then run on any GPU, in fact Quadros are very poorly suited for that kind of workload because the drivers are not optimized for it (typical CAD doesn't use it - in fact, a lot of CAD software uses horribly optimized ancient OpenGL 2.x level code - no wonder it is so slow). However, the rendering slaves can run even on completely headless machines with no GPUs - a typical configuration is a massive Linux cluster/farm.

author: thm_w
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 06, 2017, 07:28:28 pm
content: Quote from: janoc on April 06, 2017, 09:44:37 amWhether or not they use it doesn't even really matter. They basically lock off features and performance if they don't see the "quadro" or "firepro" name in the drivers.There used to be a hack for solidworks firepro, where you would change the driver ID to firepro and you would get the additional features (fsaa, improved image quality, higher fps).Its a bit of a joke now (at least for SW) considering how powerful consumer cards are. I get that nvidia wants to make extra money off of it, but, I don't see the other side of the equation.http://www.nvidia.ca/object/solidworks-quadro-visualization.htmlhttps://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Why-you-should-use-a-Quadro-video-card-in-Solidworks-2016-751/Quote

author: janoc
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2017, 04:15:01 pm
content: Quote from: thm_w on April 06, 2017, 07:28:28 pmThat's simply driver optimization, nothing else. Quadro drivers come by default optimized for these workloads, normal GeForce drivers don't. There used to be patches for the drivers themselves or people were hacking the card IDs directly too. However, today it is probably not worth bothering with this - just buy a faster card, one can upgrade 2-3x for the price of one Quadro these days.The batch rendering that was mentioned above with Backburner is a different story - the settings you use like fsaa or higher FPS have zero impact on that, the batch renderers are not used during normal operation of the software.These programs are certainly not locked to any Quadro/FireGL, because that would make the software totally unusable. Nobody would buy a batch renderer that requires each farm node to have a $2000-$3000 GPU used as a "dongle" to unlock features in addition to the already expensive per-node license.You need to make a distinction between the real time interactive work with something like SolidWorks (where a high end GPU is usually beneficial) and batch rendering for e.g. movie production or high quality presentation purposes (where a GPU, be it a Quadro or consumer card, is mostly useless and rarely used). Both "draw stuff on the screen", but the workload and the way they do it are totally different.The latter certainly doesn't require Quadro for operation nor benefits from it in any way - we have Backburner + MentalRay on several machines, 3DS Max for 3D modelling on a few too and none has a Quadro installed, because it would be a waste of money - there is almost no benefit in it. I used to administer Maya and Max installs before and while Quadro was recommended on PC (of course) it was never required.