Hello,

Ok…gonna try and not write a whole long pre-amble with my situation…here goes for the short situation/question.

Opportunity has come up to get myself a second box, pre-made instead of my usual putting system together myself.

It's coming with a Quadro 4000 graphics card.

The last time I researched this, if I remember correctly…that such cards, for their price factor, offer only nominal performance improvement over a very good ‘gaming’ card.

If this turns out to be true, I may want to ‘haggle’ a price break and have the card replaced with a gaming one.

Any thoughts on performance, issues or considerations to think of in using a Quadro 4000 with Houdini?

Thanks

Do not get a quadro, that's my recommendation. The only difference between quadro cards and gtx cards is that quadro cards have error correcting memory. You only need this when you need super accurate scientific computation (like climate simulation) and even then, I see most Machine learning researchers using Titan X card. The other reason is that some quadro cards come with 24GB vram, but I doubt you'll need this.

For the same amount of money, GTX cards are much faster.

Thanks for your input LLFA.

Yeah…that's something I wonder about…what part of using Houdin would take advatage of 24G on those cards.

Further reading since I posted brought me across some reference to those newer cards like the Quadro M6000.

Someone was saying for CAD applications they are going to see improvements in Viewport, like rotating very complex scenes.

I know I have issues with Viewport running animation ( slow and clunky ), but at the same time I also know in part it has to do with CPU calculations. ( just by looking at task manager ). So those 24G on the video card in this case might not help much.

24gb ram would be helpful if you are doing OpenCL simulations (can do bigger sims) and if you're using GPU rendering, like octane, vram is very important

IMO, the only noteworthy advantage of Quadros is that they sport more vram. It comes at a price; a 24GB Quadro P6000 is around $5,000 versus a 8GB Geforce 1080 at $600.

Quadro 4000 is Fermi architecture, pretty old. I have one myself, they get hot and loud under load. And FYI, they are about a $100 on ebay.

Thanks guys for your input.

Yeah…I'm starting to remember my conclusions I had when I researched this a few years ago…the same ideas seem to be echoing.

The main one being the very large price gap for ‘marginal’ gain applied in a specific area.

Also, a new GEForce card tends to have the same, or even more, VRAM than a Quadro of a couple of generations ago. The Quadro vs. GEForce comparison is only really valid for GPUs of the same generation.

What you can count on with Quadros is that the release of “Call of Battle Recon 5” won't destabilize your driver when you update it.

With Quadro you can start Houdini with remote desktop. I think that is still the case?

I believe as of about driver 350 (or thereabouts), HW-accelerated Remote Desktop is supported for all Nvidia cards.

Ok…that sort of puts the nail in the coffin of my original thinking…since I don't play that game