- Any idea what the practical difference between a GeForce 3 and
a Quadro 2 would be? I have the GeForce right now, using NVidia's
drivers; I'm planning on yanking the Quadro 2 from a machine we bought as
a server. Would I see any actual performance gain? Which chip is
actually faster, at least for what I'd be using it for?
As far as I know, the only differences between a GeForce2 and a Quadro 2
can be:
-Different memory clock, but this depends on the actual board you have.
Many "high-end" GeForce2-boards have a even higher mem-clock than the
Quadro-boards if I recall it correctly
-OpenGL-hardware-stereo (at least under Windows)
-Accelerated drawing of antialiased lines (which is by default crippled
or disabled on the GeForce2). Would make sense if you are looking at
chicken-wire-electron-density maps or line-drawings of your molecule a
lot, or if you are using CAD. Otherwise it would not make much sense.
The underlying hardware (i.e. the GPU itself) should be identical except
for some patched registers which identify one as a GeForce and the other
as a Quadro (enabling the above-mentioned features).
Performance-differences (at least in the consumer-sector) normaly arise
from the surrounding stuff, i.e. type of graphics-memory, clockspeeds
(memspeed beeing more important than GPU-speed, as the GeForce is
bandwith-limited) etc.
Bottomline: I would not expect a huge performance-improvement.
Hope this helps.
--
Bye, Marc Saric
Max-Planck-Institut fuer molekulare Physiologie
Otto-Hahn-Str.11 44227 Dortmund phone:0231/133-2168
