NVIDIA Quadro DDR

Analysis/Conclusion

The Quadro DDR, Quadro SDR and GeForce GPU’s are remarkable achievements due to NVIDIA’s ability to put a very powerful T&L engine into a single chip graphics processor.  The performance of the Quadro and GeForce units are very similar except that the wireframe feature is not enabled or implemented effectively in the GeForce GPU.

From the test data some reasonable conclusions about the Quadro DDR card can be inferred:

Polygon Rate - The polygon performance of the Quadro DDR, GLoria II Quadro SDR and GeForce SDR cards are about the same.  The GLperf test results, the Indy3D MCAD150, the OCUS R20 and SPECapc Pro/E results support this conclusion.

Fill Rate - The fill rate performance of the Quadro DDR is better than the Quadro SDR or the GeForce SDR. This can be seen in the GLperf test, and the Indy3D Simulation test.

AA Lines - The  Quadro DDR like the SDR version does not have any problems with AA lines unlike the GeForce. The GeForce has problems with AA lines and when used with the NVIDIA 3.65 driver it could not run to completion the SPECapc Pro/E Rel. 20 test or all of the ProCDRS-02 tests.

Visualization Apps - For the visualization class of tasks that require a high fill rates, the Quadro DDR is somewhat faster than the GLoria II Quadro SDR and the GeForce SDR which offer similar performance.  The test results from the Indy3D Simulation  and Viewperf’s Awadvs-03 tests support this view.

MCAD Apps - On the MCAD types of application and tasks, the Quadro DDR is not much faster than GLoria II Quadro SDR. On the large model in the SPECapc Pro/E 20 test suite the Quadro DDR did not show much performance advantages over the Quadro SDR. 

CPU Utilization - The Quadro DDR like the GLoria II Quadro SDR does make considerable use of the host CPU as was illustrated by the test results; the up side to this is that its performance will scale as the CPU speed.  Thus it will run even faster on the new generation of fast CPU’s just coming to market.  Conversely, it might not be too good a choice to use with an older generation slower CPU.  This is a very interesting conclusion because you would think that the overhead placed on the CPU would have been offloaded almost completely onto the hardware T&L engine of the Quadro.

Large Textures - The Quadro cards because of the additional 32 MB of on card memory handle large textures sizes in the range of 16 MB to 48 MB better than the 32 MB GeForce cards. This may or may not be an important factor; it depends on the specific visualization task or job.

Now let us compare the relative performance of Quadro DDR, Quadro SDR to the much cheaper Geforce 256 SDR on the more involved tests, all with the same 3.65 driver. The performance results in the table are normalized to the GeForce SDR score. ( A score of 1.20 means that it is 20% faster than the GeForce SDR.)

Not much difference in performance given the price differential! The Quadro DDR is an excellent pro class card, but will it be worth the added cost over the normal Quadro SDR or the much cheaper GeForce?  In most cases no. If  AA lines don't matter to you or you don't use larger textures ( over 16 MB ), then the much cheaper GeForce SDR cards are much more cost effective than either of the two Quadro configurations. With that said, the Quadro DDR when it reaches production will be one of the best professional graphics cards available.