Conclusion

Or today’s tests of contemporary mid-range graphics accelerators once again confirmed that there remains parity between AMD and Nvidia solutions. In fact, it means that there are no evident favorites and outsiders. In certain applications the winner may be different. For example, ATI FireGL solutions perform best in Maya and AutoCAD, while Nvidia takes over the leadership in SolidWorks and 3ds max.

So, we cannot really recommend any particular professional graphic accelerator at this time. These cards are pretty expensive and choosing the right solution for your needs is very serious and responsible task. Especially since true professionals rarely use different application suites at the same time. Therefore, the choice of the optimal graphics accelerator for a workstation should first of all depend on the way this workstation is used. All the data you might need to make the right choice is given in this article.

In addition to the conclusions regarding the performance made above, I would like to say that we do not see any parity from the power consumption standpoint. The top AMD solutions use 80nm chips, so they turn out considerably less economical than Quadro FX cards. Therefore, it would be really interesting to check out the new ATI FireGL V7700 graphics card based on the brand new RV670, which we are going to do in the nearest future.

The last thing we can say basing on the obtained results, is that gaming graphics cards can also demonstrate good performance in contemporary CAD and CAM systems. The situation has changed: the top gaming graphics accelerator we took as n example this time – GeForce 9800 GTX – was completely defeated by its professional opponents only in one synthetic SPECviewperf testing suite working with an OpenGL driver. In real applications the systems equipped with this card performed very well. Moreover, in some tasks such as SolidWorks 2008 and AutoCAD, it worked even faster than 100-dollare professional solutions.