"Professional" graphics cards. Worth it?

[Scouse]

I'm talking about stuff like Nvidia's Quadro line.

The way I see it, any standard graphics card that's capable of playing games at a high resolution should be capable of performing admirably for tasks such as photoshopping and the like. So what's the point of professional graphics cards?

In the dark days before graphics acceleration was the norm I could see a lot of marketing value in it, but nowadays I just can't see the point.

It's not as if AutoCAD isn't going to run on a Radeon HD is it?

 

[Ch3tan]

Think it's more to do with the fact that you can run more than two displays at very high resolutions, all running very graphics intensive programs. Not something that modern gaming cards are designed to do.

 

[Scouse]

But they are!

I run a dual-monitor setup at home, both at high res. A friend runs a triple-monitor jobby for gaming (WoW on 3 screens).

That's why I'm skeptical. You can get a quadro now for about a hundred quid - way cheaper than most gaming solutions. I just can't see any technological reason for bothering?

 

[SilverHood]

The only reason you'd buy a professional graphics graphics card is to render graphics in specialised applications, especially OpenGL based CAD applications. That said, unless you're doing advanced stuff like ray traces, gradient fills and applying surfaces to objects, then you wont really see a difference versus top end gaming cards these days.

Incidentally, I have a Quadro in my work PC, but then I run 4 x monitors at an uber resolution.

 

[Kryten]

The Quadro's available for 100 quid will be based on the next step down (pricewise) consumer card. So for instance, a 100 quid Quadro will likely be a higher quality and slower (for gaming) 8800 core unit.