Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)

21 Oct 2005

 

New Nvidia Workstation Option, When it Matters

Now that Apple finally has a true workstation card option on their Power Macs, users contemplating getting the card are asking if it really matters and where? After all, the card that Apple chose to have supported isn't a low or mid range product. In fact, it's not even a high-end product -- it's an ultra-high-end product.

Comments from Matthew Craig of Luxology, posted in their forums, and from senior associate editor, Rick Bernstein, president of Three Dimension Technology, a consulting firm in New York City specializing in CAD and 3D rendering solutions, will help us clarify the matter a bit.

The question is: should I spend nearly $1800 on the Quadro FX 4500 card?

That will completely depend on the type of work that you do. For the general architectural 3D viz pro, final single frame render results will not be dependent on the graphics card much. When asked about his take on the new tools Rick Bernstein said, "The new graphics card doesn't really excite me. I generally am looking for the fastest speed to a final rendering and the graphics card does nothing to speed that up. Most Mac 3d programs don't rely heavily on the graphics processors at this level because the support was never available."

In fact Rick brings up an excellent point that users should consider. Mac applications do not have a history of "certification" with individual workstation graphics cards, unlike many PC-based applications. So the new Quadro FX 4500 card isn't going to be fully tapped by any software product on the market today that runs on the Mac.

Matthew Craig's comments in the Luxology forums clarify some other items. He writes, "For modo 201, there are few things to look for in a graphics card. First and foremost is VRAM -- the bigger the VRAM the more textures and VBOs (meshes) you can keep on the card at one time. This is for general usage." Clearly the new Quadro card offers the most VRAM ever on a Mac card, at 512MB. The rest of his comments (20 post down) are also very interesting as he discusses the general differences between Nvidia cards compared to ATI cards.

Suggestions

If you do highly textural work in 3d, complete with many texture units and at a high texture resolution, then getting the Quadro FX 4500 card may make sense from the point of view of VRAM alone. It really depends on how much faster your workflow improves because the return on investment time may take awhile. This card is very expensive. It's also the most powerful graphics card Nvidia has ever made.

If you have avoided getting a Mac because you couldn't get such cards and needed them for your work, then certainly this card coupled with the new Quad is for you.

For people doing CAD, even 3D CAD this card is likely complete over-kill. A more appropriate choice for CAD work would be a card like Nvidia's Quadro FX 1400, a mid range product that might typically add about $420 to the base price of a Dell or BOXX workstation. Hopefully in the future we will see a card like this available, as it will really help round out Apple's pro workstation lineup.

For now, if your work doesn't demand the ultimate power of the FX 4500, then Apple's next best choice is the Nvida GeForce 6600 card.

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