AFAIK the drivers aren't optimised for games. So there could be performance and compatibility issues when playing games...

To answer in short, workstation cards can be used for gaming but it's best to use hacked versions of the respective Geforce or Radeon drivers (Omega or similar). This should give you similar performance to a standard "gaming" card.

ATM one of my machines is using an ATi FireGL 8800 (Radeon 8500), with hacked drivers it performs just great.

It should work just fine. I think it should also be possible to 'degrade' the card to plain fx 5900. As far as I know, those fx 5900 are the last soft-moddable series of geforce. Ofc I could be wrong...

I suggest finding a benchmark for the card online and looking at the results. I have a handful of older FX500 AGP cards that score around 4.2k 3dmarks in 2001se with a 450MHz PII- a lot higher than a V5500!

Quadro's usually has 15-20% worse gaming performance than the "normal" version of the card like the Geforce 7800GTX vs Quadro FX4500
Have checked some benchmarks to find out this fact

I suggest finding a benchmark for the card online and looking at the results. I have a handful of older FX500 AGP cards that score around 4.2k 3dmarks in 2001se with a 450MHz PII- a lot higher than a V5500!

Thats strange! Very good results considering. I just benched my Athlon TBird 1000Mhz with a Geforce 3 Deluxe and it only scored 4456 on 2001se from a clean install of windows 98se. AFAIK the Geforce 3 Ti500 series is quicker than an FX5200 in directX 8 (by a fair bit) and my CPU is about 3 times as fast as a P2 450.

*bump*

How do you softmod the Quadro FX to improve gaming performance? Wiki mentions there are firmware and driver differences between GeForce and Quadro. Does this alter the core configuration for pixel shader, vertex shader, texture mapping, etc.?

I have a Quadro FX500, which uses the same NV34 core as the FX5200, but the Quadro specs seem a lot better according to GPU-Z and Everest Home.

Quadro FX500
Memory Bandwidth: 7.8 GB/s
Memory Width: 128-bit
GPU: 270 MHz
RAM: 243 MHz (485 MHz effective)

Geforce FX5200
Memory Bandwidth: 2.1 GB/s
Memory Width: 64-bit
GPU: 250 MHz
RAM: 133 MHz (266 MHz effective)

Considering that the memory bandwidth of the Quadro is 3-4x that of the FX5200 and that the GPU of the Quadro is clocked higher than the FX5200, wouldn't the Quadro FX500 play just about any game faster than the FX5200, even unmodified?

Any idea which Geforce card this FX500 might be comparable to in both the unmodified and softmodified states?

feipoa wrote:

*bump*
Considering that the memory bandwidth of the Quadro is 3-4x that of the FX5200 and that the GPU of the Quadro is clocked higher than the FX5200, wouldn't the Quadro FX500 play just about any game faster than the FX5200, even unmodified?

Most likely, yes. But keep in mind that it's a 64-bit (memory interface) version of FX5200 you have. There should be a 128-bit version of the plain FX5200, and the Ultra version will have the 128-bit interface though clocked much higher.

Any idea which Geforce card this FX500 might be comparable to in both the unmodified and softmodified states?

A Quadro model doesn't necessarily have a Geforce equivalent. But in this case, I think you can still have a relatively comparable model if you can get 128-bit version of FX5200/5300/5500 (all using variants of NV34) and then clock it accordingly.

Btw, unless you have real need for it, I'd suggest against softmodding because it's not always working properly. In most cases, a Quadro should have no issues in games, even if unofficially-supported. On the other hand, modding a GF to Quadro (if successful) will yield boosts only in supported/optimized applications (not necessarily any CAD/CAM/3D app).

On a PIII-S Tualatin 1.4 GHz, I get 100 fps running demo four in Quake III using the FX500. Using the FX600 (PCI), I get 71 fps on a different motherboard. I used the default options and resolution at 1280 x 1024.

Anyone else with a Tualatin setup and an NVIDIA GeForce 5 or 6 series have any Quake III benchmark scores? Thanks!

For the past several years I've used Quadro FX 3450, 4500, and 5500 cards and never had a problem playing games with any of them. Not sure how they compare speed-wise to their GeForce equivalents, but as far as compatibility goes they seem fine.

Very different from the 3Dlabs Wildcat 7110 card that was in my P4 system, which was relatively fast in Maya & 3dsmax but couldn't draw DirectX games properly.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/workstati … aming,3425.html

I'd say the quadro is roughly a fx5500
http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=344&card2=158#

Just for clarification, GeForce 6800 (NV40) are the last GeForce chips capable of being fully made into a Quadro 😉

I bought a Quadro FX1000 almost 1 year ago. Which one is its geforce equivalent?

subhuman@xgtx wrote:

I bought a Quadro FX1000 almost 1 year ago. Which one is its geforce equivalent?

GeForce FX 5800

This is pretty accurate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_quadro , but keep in mind that Quadros have often slightly different clocks than GeForces.