So, my 8 month old home workstation computer seemed to be undamaged from the fire, but when I tried to start it up again, it failed - lights and fans, but otherwise black screen… Since we weren’t sure if it was the vid card, the HD, the mainboard, or something else, and since it was “totaled” anyway by the insurance company, my computer builder built me another one. Pretty much the same config, just a slightly faster i7. However, since the original had a Quadro 2000 and there has been so much noise around Quadros not performing any better than GTX’s with Rhino, I told him - how about putting in a good GTX instead? He suggested a 780 with 3Gb, but said it wouldn’t fit in the original sized case - too long - so we would have to go with a huge Coolermaster case. I said, OK, what the heck… Foolish me…
New computer built, new screens (same as earlier, dual 1920 x 1200 displays), both disks from the original were OK, so they got imaged over, so the machine is almost identical to the original with the exception of the vid card.
The performance of the 780 positively sucks with Rhino. There isn’t a Holomark available currently to test, but just making 100 10mm spheres (jagged and faster) and running TestMaxSpeed (shaded mode, 4x antialiasing) takes 4.6 seconds. Compare that to my nearly 2 year old laptop with a Quadro 2000M/2 Gb which does the same thing in 1.75 seconds. With 16x AA to boot…
Edit: my Quadro 4000 workstation at school does testmaxspeed with the 100 spheres in 0.6 seconds…
I thought, this can’t be right, there must be some driver problem, so I completely uninstalled all video drivers all the way back to VGA and then installed the latest WHQL Nvidia driver using “clean install”.
Exactly the same result.
So now, on top of everything else, I am now the proud owner of a brand new handicapped computer… So, what to do now? Go back and pay for a Quadro out of my own pocket?
GTX as good as or better than a Quadro? Not anywhere near in my experience…
–Mitch