Hi,
I just would like to ask some help and experience suggestions with the above mentioned hardwares, Quadro, FirePro, or the consumer GTX. So, regarding professional hardwares it behaves different way in case of different softwares. I just worry because someone on the forum mentioned only 25% better performance in case of Quadro vs GTX.
My budget is until Quadro 4000.
With my own cash, I bought a GTX.
At work I have a Quadro 5000.
Pleased with both but I think the Quadro is not worth the premium. We buy these at work to conform to software guidelines (CATIA for example).
Yes, it was the result from my tests between Quadro 4000 and GTX285. But newer GTX are an other story, they can be much slower than the GTX285, since Nvidia limited something of the old OpenGL pipeline and the Rhino team doesn’t look for a solution. So we are in really bad situation and you can spend a lot of money for nothing.
Finally I bought an used GTX285 with 2GB.
thanks for your comments
It’s a problem not to know what v6 will bring. I need more graphic memory, but I’m not sure what card is to buy so that it is a good deal for the next year too. A Quadro 6000 with 6GB? And than Rhino v6 will work fine with modern GTX cards and the Quadro 6000 isn’t worth the money. At this point Rhino is a nightmare for pro users. 
That to me is an odd statement. Is it a nightmare because it is slow, or because it is fast on cheap hardware?
If you need more graphicmemory then buy a GTX. And then if you need you can upgrade to an expencive Q6000 later on. By the time V6 ships the Q6000 will have dropped in price you so you will have covered your expence.
And remember that you can have two cards in a machine and choose which one Rhino shall run on.
Thing is this all IT industry is a nightmare. Wean talk about AMD openCL drivers as well, rendering engines at Cuda vs CPU side, memory usage and so on…
I need to work on several heavy Rhino tasks at the same time. So I need graphic memory for Rhino. The good old 2xx series allow to use 2GB memory. Which new GTX works better than the old one?
The nightmare is that there is no clear recommendation which card can be used to get speed and memory. So, I could choose a modern card with a big memory and low speed at v5. But I would like to choose a card that fast runs at v6 - Quadro or GTX product line? Or will the display pipeline stay at this low level and no matter which card is used, the GPU will be not full used?
I am making Holomark2 into a thorough test now, and the biggest heads up so far is that there is not so much difference in real life work, but a huge one when it comes to handling big meshes. A block is in many ways quite similar to a complex mesh, as it “can be considered static”, so hopefully they will figure out a way to speed up block handling in V6. I would gladly work mainly in blocks on large files, if that gave us the enormous speed difference that meshes has.
Spoiler allert: Initial test shows that a Quadro 4000 can handle 99 meshes with 370K polys each in a v4-like render mode, while my laptop with a 330M can only handle 2… Yet in Rendered mode for the Nurbs version the difference is less than 2x.
I hope this is not the only statement for v6. Rhino is a NURBS modeller and a big problem is the speed of displayed NURBS and curves. You know the medium complex bike NURBS model, the display is slow and the trick is to extract the render mesh and hide the NURBS/curves to get speed. So the big question for v6 is - will the NURBS display faster and which cards will bring the best speed - Quadro or GTX?
Quadro 4000 is a good card especially when it deals with meshes… The price has dropped after the K4000? 3G version came out. I recommended Quadro 4000 to my friends as well a couple days ago… I don’t understand why people compare GTX to Quadro… When GTX or whatever gaming cards deal with complex scenes, you will notice the differences… Also,letting Rhino side test every single card is a ridiculous request.
Edit: I cannot assume Quadro is better than Firepro but when It works Adobe or Autodesk products It’s faster (Quadro 4000 vs Firepro V5900) but without mesh objects in Rhino Firepro is much faster when file sizes get big… I have no idea why but that’s what I’ve seen… Firepro V5900 is not a bad choice… I also recommend this card as well… It supports up to three monitors VS Quadro 4000 only support two monitors.
Right, the mesh performance is quite good, that is clear visible at all tests, for example the old holo mark scores. But Rhino is sold as NURBS modeller and for example I like to keep my NURBS geometry without to convert anything to meshes. But the Rhino display doesn’t well handle complex NURBS models (like a detailed bike). Last my frame rate dropped down to 0.5 frames per second and I see no hardware that could solve the problem, since the GPU nor the CPU are full used.
I thought about to buy an used Quadro 6000, but will the display much faster than 0.5 fps (GTX285) at my train model? A Quadro 4000 would give me approx. 0.6 fps, so I afraid a Quadro 6000 is wasted money too.
Just be patient, the new Holomark2 will test the system to see how many minis it can handle at different display modes before dropping below 15 fps, and not only show how fast it can handle one.
I also have some doubts which graphic cards to choose… Is NVIDIA Quadro K2000 worth it’s price ?
You can now check out the scores in the “Holomark2 Relase Candidate thread”