Professional Workstation or Consumer Gaming Graphics?

For many CAD software companies, certified workstation graphics cards are recommended for the best performance. While this specification isn’t a necessity for the applications to run, they may have a significant upper hand compared to consumer-level and gaming graphics cards due to professional drivers being installed on the cards. In some cases, the name on the label and the drivers applied are the only differences between a $100 gaming GPU vs. a $400 workstation GPU. In some instances, however, available pipelines, shader clock speeds, and accuracy in rendering geometry can be tangible improvements when going with the professional graphics card.

Deciding between the two still causes frustration and there isn’t much real world proof to research or work from in determining any substantial improvement in performance for the added cost. While workstation cards certainly work better on CAD and database calculations compared to games (and vis versa with the gaming graphics cards), is the additional investment really worth it? I don’t have a good answer for that. Let me give you a simple solution anyway: If you are purchasing a business-class workstation, it will be coming bundled with a workstation graphics card and if you are buying a consumer-grade gaming machine for your CAD work, it almost definitely has a gaming GPU installed – so don’t sweat it!

Deciphering the Graphics Card Naming Game

There are many tricks companies play when coming up with a name for a product. AMD and nVidia are no different. Subtle differences in card numbers, letters, and price can actually mean huge differences in performance. The graphic below (originally from geforce.com and picked up from lifehacker.com) is just a brief introduction to how confusing the GPU names are:

This is just a sampling from nVidia’s desktop consumer and workstation graphics cards, not to mention how confusing it can become when you introduce their mobile GPU’s for notebooks. And while this following image doesn’t show the performance of each card, you can tell the naming scheme used by AMD is only a little easier to understand:

The typical practice nVidia and AMD use for their mobile cards is simply adding an “m” (for mobile) to the beginning or end of the card number, but that doesn’t mean it will perform the same as it’s desktop equivalent. This is where you have to be very careful. For a full explanation of GPU performance numbers and a comparison of cards worth looking into, check back soon for the next Indydrafter CAD Hardware post on graphics cards.