Many people are using professional versions of otherwise expensive graphics cards. In some cases they are marginally slower in games than the consumer version.

Most NVIDIA or AMD graphics use the same PCB and just differ in BIOS and driver between professional and consumer cards.
Sometimes there are hacks flashing cards of one line with the BIOS of the other.
Mostly this is done to use cheaper consumer boards with the drivers for the expensive professional series.
Main difference is the drivers where consumer cards are optimized for games performance where the pro cards are often optimized for CAD and other professional purposes.
Developing the drivers for professional applications is much more demanding and expensive.
You do not want to see any glitches and artifacts in your CAD if you payed 2000 bucks for the video board.

There is a difference with professional Open GL cards like Wildcat, Intergraph, HP Visualize FX, Evans&Sutherland and so on.
These boards can rarely be used for gaming, as the only drivers that exist are optimized for professional applications and not even DirectX drivers exist.

You can game on 3Dlabs cards. Permedia and Wildcat series have Direct3D support. Performance is lacking though. Most Wildcat cards are on par with GeForce 256/GeForce 2 MX.

eisapc wrote on 2024-06-14, 07:10:

Most NVIDIA or AMD graphics use the same PCB and just differ in BIOS and driver between professional and consumer cards. Sometim […]
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Most NVIDIA or AMD graphics use the same PCB and just differ in BIOS and driver between professional and consumer cards.
Sometimes there are hacks flashing cards of one line with the BIOS of the other.
Mostly this is done to use cheaper consumer boards with the drivers for the expensive professional series.
Main difference is the drivers where consumer cards are optimized for games performance where the pro cards are often optimized for CAD and other professional purposes.
Developing the drivers for professional applications is much more demanding and expensive.
You do not want to see any glitches and artifacts in your CAD if you payed 2000 bucks for the video board.

There is a difference with professional Open GL cards like Wildcat, Intergraph, HP Visualize FX, Evans&Sutherland and so on.
These boards can rarely be used for gaming, as the only drivers that exist are optimized for professional applications and not even DirectX drivers exist.

that's what is interesting, the idea that the boards are essentially the same - though reading about quadro it adds ecc memory and higher levels of floating point precision as an example

it makes no sense as a games card, but in the retro world they appear now and then and form viable alternatives (and often get overlooked)

it would be interesting to try gaming on those more bespoke professional cards, just to see the extent to which they cope

I'm trying to collect high-end Compaq/HP laptops .. they all have pro GPUs.

HP/Compaq NW8000 has an ATI Mobility FireGL T2 - Identical to the Radeon 9500 Mobility, except double memory bus, faster clocks. (max binning)
Hp/Compaq 8510w has a Nvidia Quadro FX 570M - Identical to the Geforce 8600M GT, except slower clocks.
HP Zbook G2 has a (upgraded) Nvidia Quadro M2200 - Identical to the Geforce 965M, except slower clocks. (max RAM, GDDR5)
HP Zbook G7 has a Nvidia Quadro T2000 Max Q - Identical to the Geforce GTX 1650, except max shaders, slower clocks, GDDR6 refresh RAM. (max binning)

All of these workstation laptops were sold to businesses and were the $5-10k laptops of the day. So vendors took the most expensive upgrades, as long as they were refined/quiet. The next generation of RAM or double the memory bus can add ~10% performance, while the slower clocks, or max-Q found the ideal performance-noise curve.

May be similar to gaming laptop performance, but much quieter.

MikeSG wrote on 2024-06-14, 11:26:

I'm trying to collect high-end Compaq/HP laptops .. they all have pro GPUs. […]
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I'm trying to collect high-end Compaq/HP laptops .. they all have pro GPUs.

HP/Compaq NW8000 has an ATI Mobility FireGL T2 - Identical to the Radeon 9500 Mobility, except double memory bus, faster clocks. (max binning)
Hp/Compaq 8510w has a Nvidia Quadro FX 570M - Identical to the Geforce 8600M GT, except slower clocks.
HP Zbook G2 has a (upgraded) Nvidia Quadro M2200 - Identical to the Geforce 965M, except slower clocks. (max RAM, GDDR5)
HP Zbook G7 has a Nvidia Quadro T2000 Max Q - Identical to the Geforce GTX 1650, except max shaders, slower clocks, GDDR6 refresh RAM. (max binning)

All of these workstation laptops were sold to businesses and were the $5-10k laptops of the day. So vendors took the most expensive upgrades, as long as they were refined/quiet. The next generation of RAM or double the memory bus can add ~10% performance, while the slower clocks, or max-Q found the ideal performance-noise curve.

May be similar to gaming laptop performance, but much quieter.

thats an interesting pursuit. Once top of line machines, now long past their commercial utility, might be really cheap

i think of it both as a matter of interest and potentially of use, like an old truck may be old but it can still haul a load - so an old high end machine can still do high end things from its time, and maybe play a game too 😀

Back in the days when the cards were current I found they were slower and more expensive than the consumer desktop cards.

Yep! I have several early Quadro cards. I like how they look - they have a very OEM/reference design look. Some of them have beefier PCI brackets where the slot cover rolls over slightly to make the card more feel rigid. They tend not to have crazy graphics or logos. Any differences in performance doesn't bother me, plus I tend to be CPU bound with these cards anyway.

One of my favorites was the NVS 100. It's basically an MX440 which is already a very compatible card supporting a wide range of games and is also passive. However it needs an LVH60 adapter to get DVI or VGA out of it, so it's a little more cumbersome.

gerry wrote on 2024-06-14, 10:25:

that's what is interesting, the idea that the boards are essentially the same - though reading about quadro it adds ecc memory and higher levels of floating point precision as an example

Could one tell if card has ECC by it having an odd number of memory chips? The couple of Quadros I have all have the same number of chips as their GeForce counterparts. I suppose I could look up the actual chip markings and see if the ECC is somehow spread across an even number of chips.

I game on a quadro RTX 4000 on my modern rig because I have several VMs on passthrough on the same machine and need the PCIe slots one per VM and hence single-slot cards. For my retro machines I don't have any reason to. I do have a collection of professional cards for the VGAmuseum but have never gamed with them.

I have 2 quadro cards
Quadro2 Pro ELSA GLoria III
Quadro FX 1100

The Elsa gloria is maybe my best looking graphics card. It is very stable and perhaps the earliest card with DVI apprehendable.

I have not tried the quadro FX card, I have read it's too new for retro gaming sadly as there is no support for old drivers.

It generally cheaper to go with old professional cards than highend consumer GPUs, even if they are sometimes identical.
Examples :
- Quadro 2 pro ~= Geforce2 Ultra
- Quadro 4 980XGL ~= GeForce4 ti4800
- Quadro fx1000/2000 can often be moded to GeForce Fx5800 (ultra)
- Quadro NVS280 ~= Fx5200/5500. can be found on PCI for much cheaper

I always went the other way with nvidia quadro;

Hacked quadro driver on Consumer card. Usually, the only real difference, hardware wise, are some jumpers.

I use some thirsty CAD software that prefers the OpenGL stacks provided by professional cards, and I could get that with hacked drivers.

wierd_w wrote on 2024-06-16, 12:06:

I always went the other way with nvidia quadro;

Hacked quadro driver on Consumer card. Usually, the only real difference, hardware wise, are some jumpers.

I use some thirsty CAD software that prefers the OpenGL stacks provided by professional cards, and I could get that with hacked drivers.

Yeah this was pretty common it seems. You see it on different forums but now we want to do the opposite. 🙃

Most Quadro cards have slower clocks than fastest GeForce variants but not always. Quadro features are useless in games but there is no downside to using Quadro versus GeForce. These cards use the same drivers and you can even mod one in to another if you really wanted using RivaTuner NVStrap driver.

The biggest reason to get Quadro is price: often you can save a lot of bucks. Another reason is availability.

For example I recently ordered Quadro FX 1300 128MB so NV38 GPU for less than 50 bucks. Its pretty much underclocked GeForce PCX 5950 so PCI-E version of GeForce FX - of course this card's killer feature is it being supercharged RivaTNT. Newer cards like GF6 are terrible for Windows 98 without any legacy features and not having proper 16bpp support (no dithering). This Quadro has slower clocks but it isn't an issue because even with reduced clocks these cards are pretty fast and of course can be overclocked. I already have AGP version of FX 5900, the ZT variant. BTW. Running it as Quadro FX3000 via NVStrap driver.

Some time ago I bought Quadro FX3450 256MB for like 12 bucks and it was like 10x cheaper than GeForce 6800 GS PCI-E for pretty much the same card. It even uses the same PCB, have the same clocks and cooler. Just different sticker.

In other words processional cards are good option. Often can find them for fraction of the costs of consumer cards and this is despite that back in the day they were many times more expensive.

Seems like Ebay sellers are picking up on this, as I've been seeing Quadro and FireGL cards (both old and new) start at nearly the same (asking) price as their regular consumer counterparts. So it's not always cheaper anymore.

My "modern" gaming rig has a Quadro K600... a rather lame GPU. But I like that it's a low-power card. Doesn't make my room too hot in the summer.
I also have a Quadro 2000 and a Quadro FX1000. Both are fine cards for gaming.
I don't bother with overclocking GPUs, unless the cooler is really up to snuff (i.e. can keep the core under 55C under full load.) Otherwise, that's just burning the silicon away faster.