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Graphics Software Hardware

NVIDIA GeForce To Quadro Software Mod 152

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the you-bought-it-might-as-well-use-the-whole-thing dept.
babyshiori writes "The NVIDIA Quadro family of professional graphics cards are very, very expensive. But many people know that Quadro and GeForce graphics cards are virtually identical in hardware. Obviously, you cannot just use Quadro drivers with your GeForce graphics cards. However, there is an easy way to soft-mod an NVIDIA GeForce desktop graphics card into an NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics card. Tech ARP shows us just how to do it. 'It all revolves around the driver support for professional 3D applications like 3ds Max or Maya. Quadro drivers allow the Quadro to be used to accelerate the rendering operations of such professional 3D applications while GeForce drivers do not. This is the basis for the premium prices NVIDIA (and ATI) charge for their professional-grade graphics cards.'"
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NVIDIA GeForce To Quadro Software Mod More

NVIDIA GeForce To Quadro Software Mod

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  • Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pipingguy ( 566974 ) * on Saturday May 10, 2008 @05:29AM (#23359512)
    I work in an engineering field where we use Quadro cards for visualization of largish process plants in an AutoCAD 3D environment.

    This type of work is not as intensive as 3D animation.

    Over the years I've seen not much difference between "professional" and "consumer" video cards even though the cost between the two can be $600 or more.

    Even with relatively lame, $200 cards the walkthrus are pretty responsive when using the proper viewing software (the "walkthrus" are typically specially created for responsiveness so we can zoom to detail we need to see).

    Perhaps sluggish performance is a result of demos given by people who intentionally attach one entire GB of 3D models to one session and use that to demonstrate (even though no 3D modeler would ever do such a thing).

    • Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace (Score:5, Insightful)

      by reezle ( 239894 ) on Saturday May 10, 2008 @05:40AM (#23359542) Homepage
      I do the IT for a cad shop, and we've run the range of video cards, settling on these Quadros (the sub $1000 models). I'd be very curious if this mod just gives the cheap card some of the accelerations the real card has, or if it can actually keep up in the real world. Not just running canned demos, but actually plugging away in Autocad all day long...

      A benchmark of a couple of cards would be handy.
      (but for the price of a video card, I suppose I could find out myself)
      • That's the trick - there are so many combinations that a apples-to-apples comparison is impossible (and so expensive), so people go along with whatever the existing trend is.

        I've not seen noticeable differences between a Quadro 256MB card and a generic 128MB card but perhaps my applications are different from other users'.
      • If you do, make sure to return the results to Tech ARP. Or post them in the forums of Guru3D, where the tuning app was made. Other people might be interested, and they did some hard work to create the applications.

        Of course, if you look in the Guru3D forums, the hack isn't new, and I don't know what Tech ARP really did other than write a tiny article around it. Bring it in the spotlight I suppose.

        http://www.guru3d.com/category/rivatunerfaq/ [guru3d.com]

      • Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 ) on Saturday May 10, 2008 @07:10AM (#23359854) Homepage Journal
        I'm not sure. This sort of hack is "unsupported", meaning, if you run into any trouble at all, the CAD software maker, the computer maker and the video card maker do not have to help you. I think it's a nifty little hack, but if you depend on the CAD machine, getting the right card in the first place is less expensive than a day's worth of down time for a user + the tech trying to get it to work again.

        The extra cost goes towards developing and maintaining a specific driver set for the very small number of people using a low volume piece of software. The driver will load different pieces, different versions of itself based on what software is running. That's because the software is aggressively tested with specific versions of the driver to work right. That sort of support isn't cheap, and that's what you get when you pay for a Quadro.
        • It's like saying "Why use RHEL when you can get CentOS for free?" Because with RHEL I'm not really paying for software, I'm paying for support. If something goes wrong they are willing to spend time to fix it, whatever that fix ends up requiring.

          This might be useful if you are a university student who's got a cheap copy of CAD software to play with (much like CentOS is useful for the same student to learn about enterprise Linux) but this isn't some coup that is going to screw nVidia. Pros are still going to

      • Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Znork ( 31774 ) on Saturday May 10, 2008 @08:30AM (#23360136)
        From what it sounds like, the mod doesn't actually change anything, it just modifies the PCI id so the driver thinks the card is Quadro branded instead.

        Like so much else in the 'corporate computing' world, it's merely rebranded generics, with a heftier pricetag. The hardware is usually the same, and probably in this case too. Much easier to use software to artificially prevent cross-market competition; as most corporate purchasers aren't spending money out of their own pocket they don't particularly care that they're getting scammed.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by billcopc ( 196330 )
          It's easy to compare this to the recent Creative X-Fi debacle, but things are a bit different here.

          If everyone stopped buying Quadros tomorrow, the company would stop developing those advanced driver features because I can imagine they're quite costly to develop and maintain (crazy testing!). There's also fanatical support that comes along with a Quadro... call them right up and they will often mash up a quick fix specifically for your issue in a matter of days, if not hours. They know Quadro users have a

      • Re:Just Pencil-in the Broken Trace (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Molochi ( 555357 ) on Saturday May 10, 2008 @11:32AM (#23361208)
        General consensus for the softmod ITFA in TechARP's own forum is that it doesn't actually improve pro app performance (GL, 3ds, etc..) for newer (later than 6800/NV45) GPUs.

        It's kinda sad that this made the front page on slashdot.
        • Because you, personally, don't work with 3D engineering graphics on a day-to-day basis for a living? I do, and this topic is extremely interesting since much of the writing concerning 3D is related to gamers.

          You'll likely never know what I'm talking about because the real world software where this is important is hideously expensive and esoteric. Download PDMS or SmartPlant cracks (if they are even available) and see if you can get them to work.

  • Will it.... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    But will it blend?

    D'oh, sorry, force of habit. I meant, will it work with Blender? It's atrociously slow on a GeForce.

    In fact, will it work on Linux full stop? It all appears to be MS based.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Skinkie ( 815924 )
      It would be interesting to see if it enables the Quadro features in the driver. (Stereo stuff...)

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by t35t0r ( 751958 )
        yes that would be interesting, but you'd still need a dongle like the nuvision 60gx NSR box to get the signal out of the dvi/vga connectors because it doesn't have a 3 pin mini din connection.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by t35t0r ( 751958 )
          I wonder if you can use rivatuner in wine or if not then under windows then move the card to a linux box? Will the hardware mods remain?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Skinkie ( 815924 )
            The author of rivatuner is also part of the Nouveau project. For TV-out tuning we basically reused the RivaTuner code. Next to this, on *all* my old cards I have this DIN connection. Plus I guess the StereoGraphics hardware will work with an embedded signal.

  • Cool, but will pros use it? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ramk13 ( 570633 ) on Saturday May 10, 2008 @05:51AM (#23359576)
    The mod seems simple and useful for some, but most of the people who use these programs work for companies who would probably spend a few hundred more dollars for a fully supported graphics adapter for their piece of software that costs thousands of dollars.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jurily ( 900488 )
      You're missing the point. You already bought the hardware, they're just not letting you use it fully.

      It's about time for open drivers and sane business models.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by GregPK ( 991973 )
        Actually, you are wrong. The higher end version has more ram than the equivalent Ge Force. Also, everything on a Quadro card is tested to work perfectly before leaving the factory.

        Since Nvidia does all of their manufacturing through the likes of foundries or third party chip manufactures. I'm willing to bet the tolerances for a Quadro card are significantly higher.

        Like I said earlier, this hack is great for those who run their own shop. Students, or those starting out. But, no way would I want to run th
    • I know you've already disregarded your own post, but I have a little insight to offer anyway.

      I work at a fabrication machine shop. I am 17 years of age and I work all the time with multi-million dollar contracts. Many a time, a small change in machine programming by me has saved hundreds of thousands in material costs.

      I am also their IT guy.

      Myself and one other person do all of the CAD work. I find that oftentimes, our hardware feels underpowered. I've wondered why that is. As such, my employer ENC

      • Re:Cool, but will pros use it? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by badasscat ( 563442 ) <basscadet75@NOspAm.yahoo.com> on Sunday May 11, 2008 @01:30AM (#23366938)
        The first time one of your "new ideas" breaks your company's CAD software and your call to support goes unanswered because you were using an unsupported modification, thereby rendering thousands of dollars worth of both hardware and software pretty much useless, I expect your company will change their tune.

        Companies that have been around long enough have usually learned the hard way that it pays to do things above board. Murphy's Law exists for a reason. Any failure point, given a long enough gestation period, *will* fail. And using an unsupported modification in a professional setting is, if nothing else, a failure point.
  • I doubt I would *need* to do so, but does this hack work on laptop nVidia cargs (their GeForce Go or Mobile series)?

    I already use a desktop driver with a modded INF file from http://laptopvideo2go.com/ [laptopvideo2go.com] (nVidia's drivers for their older - 7600 in my case - laptop cards are crap, especially on Vista), so I'm not afraid of installing a desktop driver on a laptop, but might this driver make demands of the card that the mobile versions are incapable of?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jamesh ( 87723 )
      The article pretty clearly spells out that there has to exist a quadro card that has the same chipset as your current geforce card.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 )
        There are mobile Quadros, so you just need to make sure your notebook is using the same die.
  • What exactly is this enabling? I get that it's for "professional" applications, but what features do those use that aren't turned on normally?
    • I mean, sure, it's cool, but a software house using Maya and 3DS max would want to real gear, and people not in that category would be unlikely to need such a hack. Especially since you *really* don't want to be using hacked up code with your Gforce card.

      This does not detract from the cleverness of those who did it, but in the final analysis it's virtually pointless.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by afidel ( 530433 )
        Think graphics student. They probably have access to the software for their class but probably don't have the money for a card that costs as much as their desktop. Also as someone above pointed out there is no Quadro to Go card and laptops are popular with students (heck you might use it to give a presentation on a laptop in the professional world).

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by darthflo ( 1095225 )
          There's quite obviously no Quadro to Go card, as nobody but Alienware (in one model, iirc) ever cared to implement swappable mobile graphics modules with the intent of actually selling different adapters.
          There, however, are several notebooks equipped with mobile quadro chips, most notably Lenovo's ThinkPad Tp Mobile Workstations [lenovo.com]. There's even some T series ThinkPads (without the p) equipped with QuadroFX chips.

          Also, note that the discussed hack identifies a GeForce series card as it's equivalent Quadro

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Khyber ( 864651 )
            "as nobody but Alienware (in one model, iirc) ever cared to implement swappable mobile graphics modules with the intent of actually selling different adapters."

            That's a LIE. HP offers MXM-slot graphics in their nx9420 series of commercial laptops and higher, and in the DV series of consumer laptop. Have you ever shopped around for laptops with removable cards, before, let alone performed repair work for a company that manufactures cards with swappable graphics cards?
            • I stand corrected. Haven't followed the MXM market all that much in the past few years, so I should probably have expected that.

              Anyways, some quick googling [mxm-upgrade.com] indicates several no-name and even a few brands (Alienware, fsc, HP) actually implementing MXM -- impressive, you were totally right on that count. What you forgot to mention, though, is that people don't even try selling new cards. Check this [nvidia.com]. Even nVidia Staff (a Moderator) can only point to ebay and a rather dubious source [mxm-upgrade.com] (I don't mind one-person

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Khyber ( 864651 )
                nVidia does produce MXM hardware, you just can't buy it from them direct. They sell their chips to manufacturers and the manufacturers produce the board. This is done to compete with Toshiba and Alienware, since their solutions are not cross-compatible, nVidia aims to dominate the upgradable laptop arena by providing a common-interface solution and removing hardware vendor lock-in.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by evanbd ( 210358 )
        Yup. Got that part. But what are the actual operations being performed, in more detail than "professional work"? Yeah, Maya, 3DS -- but how are those different from other programs that render 3D images?

        • About all I've ever figured out is that the so-called "professional" apps have code in them that says

          if (card == quadro) {
          run();
          } else {
          complain_that_you_need_a_quadro_card_and_refuse_to_work();
          }
      • I'm sure game modders would want this. I know my friend spends a lot of time rendering buildings and textures. Also, he recently did some freelance work rendering buildings for a local car commercial. So basically the 3D hobbyist will probably want to do this.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jimicus ( 737525 )

      What exactly is this enabling? I get that it's for "professional" applications, but what features do those use that aren't turned on normally?

      The application can ask the video card to perform some intensive work, farming it off from the main CPU of the PC for improved performance.

      With the standard GeForce drivers, the video card will refuse to do this. However, with the Quadro drivers, it'll do it just fine.

      The article tells you how to persuade the system to use Quadro drivers as opposed to GeForce. It requires some minor tweaking but it doesn't seem particularly dangerous.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Svartalf ( 2997 )
        Nope. What happens with the Quadro drivers more than anything else is that they do combining and optimization of immediate mode rendering
        requests, namely doing "write this poly, now write this one, now write this one, etc..." which is the easier way to do CAD software rendering. It can
        only be "sped up" by a little bit, taking advantage of the fragment shader path in a minimal manner. Games, on the other hand, present a command list to
        the engine and then say "Go render this pool of commands, come back t

      • The application can ask the video card to perform some intensive work, farming it off from the main CPU of the PC for improved performance.
        Any idea what specific APIs those are? Are they APIs that are specific to the Quadro cards, or are they also implemented by the FireGL cards?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mikael ( 484 )
          Traditional CAD packages in the 1990's were built on top of Phigs [wikipedia.org] and PEX, Phigs Extension to X.

          Official specification [nist.gov]

          Other animation packages were built on top of proprietary API's like SGI GL and others. It was cheaper building an emulation layer mapping Phigs and SGI GL commands to OpenGL that to rewrite the applications altogether.

          At present, the latest API is CUDA [nvidia.com]
    • Can I ask an uninformed question here? If these very expensive cards are virtually the same as the less expensive cards except for some software hack, why wouldn't gamers make use of the hack to mod their cards? Or is this already widely being done among the overclocking crowd? Or do these Quadro cards have no benefit for gamers?

      There's something that bothers me about companies that sell the exact same product for two prices and the only difference is some switch is thrown on the more expensive one. But

      • Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by montge ( 253328 ) on Saturday May 10, 2008 @08:33AM (#23360152)
        Ah, to your comment "There's something that bothers me about companies that sell the exact same product for two prices and the only difference is some switch is thrown on the more expensive one. But maybe there's more to it than that." There is something more to it...

        While there may be only minor technical differences to the cards, the real difference is in the software. In a nutshell when you're buying the "inexpensive" card, you're not paying for the extra costs that NVidia (or ATI) incurs when they must expend resources to provide drivers that support the high-end applications. So unless you want consumers that could care less about the high end features to pay more, and the people that care about these features to pay less, you'll probably be happier with differentiated products in this way.

        Don't forget companies are there to make money, and if they're not able to do this then either the company or product is likely to disappear. Personally I'd rather have NVidia around, if I need the high-end features, I'll figure out how to afford it...

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Otto ( 17870 )
          Well, then it really sounds as if they ought to be selling the software separately in that case.

          Bundling the software with the card is fine and all that, but if there's literally no real hardware difference, why have to "hack" the thing at all? Simply sell the pro-drivers separately, then if somebody needs them, they can buy them.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by edwdig ( 47888 )
            Because this approach is far, far simpler. NVIDIA doesn't sell to end users, they sell chipsets to partners who then manufacture the boards and sell them. NVIDIA prefers this as it greatly reduces their costs, and the partners prefer the current situation as they make a lot of money selling Quadro cards.

            Also, these kinds of hacks haven't been very common. But if it was as simple as just installing a different NVIDIA driver, a lot of people would just buy the cheap card and pirate the better drivers.

            • Because this approach is far, far simpler.
              Simpler for whom? I don't see how it's any simpler, or better in any other way, for the consumer.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by hxnwix ( 652290 )
            People might resent paying so much for drivers and perhaps even pirate them. Additionally, a pro card can't come in a shiny box adorned with flaming skulls and naked ladies.

            No. It's far, far better to sell them "different" hardware for much more. That way you can put it in the white box that adolescents would shun and charge more to recoup the many millions of dollars required to set bAllowWireframeAA = true.
        • Developing software is a fixed cost. You only have to do it once per card. Fixed costs shouldn't affect the price of the device -- only if it happens at all. Price should be determined by how to maximize the term (Sale Price - Marginal Costs) * (# of Sales). Marginal costs are everything required to produce one more card (so unless quadro drivers are a larger binary, the driver is not marginally more expensive than a geforce). This works under the assumption, of course, that you can only charge one price fo

      • Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)

        by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Saturday May 10, 2008 @09:18AM (#23360344) Homepage Journal

        Can I ask an uninformed question here? If these very expensive cards are virtually the same as the less expensive cards except for some software hack, why wouldn't gamers make use of the hack to mod their cards?

        Because the Quadro's extra features are not beneficial to gaming. I have a Compaq nw9440 with QuadroFX 1500 graphics (256MB, PCIEx16.) The additional features are that you can have the card render to a buffer (GPU-accelerated rendering) and you can use 10 bits per channel (r,g,b) color. Whee! Neither is useful for gaming.

        The additional color depth could be neat, if it's even used when your source textures only have 8 bits per channel. I don't know the answer to that. But let's face it, 24 bit color is probably enough for gaming and frankly, I never minded so much when I had to use 16 bit color back in the day because my computers were weak. this is pretty much the only cutting-edge system I've ever had and it was only cutting-edge for a month :)

        There WAS a SoftQuadro hack for some of the older geforce cards which had corresponding quadros. Quadros were offered with a lot more memory too, which is not something you can fix with a driver... But the mobile quadros certainly don't have more memory, so there's nothing lost there...

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Chibi Merrow ( 226057 )

          The additional features are that you can have the card render to a buffer (GPU-accelerated rendering)

          Now I may be totally off base on this, but I'm pretty sure when I do render-to-texture type operations on a GeForce card they're hardware accelerated, and that is VERY useful for gaming (it's the most common way to implement "bloom" for instance). Most cards offer >10-bit color depth now, as well, which is useful for HDR type effects. Of course most monitors are still clamped to 8-bit, but that's besides

          • I'm pretty sure when I do render-to-texture type operations on a GeForce card they're hardware accelerated

            I'm sure they are too, but I'm talking about rendering back to a region of memory on the system via DMA.

            You can copy the frame buffer (obviously, or how would you take screen shots?) but that's not quite the same thing as having it initiated by the card, which reduces processor intervention and thus processor load.

            Of course most monitors are still clamped to 8-bit, but that's besides the point... :)

            Most monitors are CRTs and support an arbitrary number of colors - we would call it "infinitely" or "continuously" variable because they accept an analog signal and render it in an analog fa

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mikael ( 484 )
          Render-To-Texture is particularly useful for doing shadow effects (render to the buffer to get the depth information, and do a perspective transformation to transform world-space coordinates into light-source coordinates).

          Even a Geforce Go 5600 supports floating point textures.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Znork ( 31774 )
      From what it sounds like, nothing. The 'professional' applications simply require the quadro driver (heck, the standard drivers might even be preventing acceleration if you have a process named 'autocad' running) and the quadro driver doesn't run on the consumer cards (not because of any hardware difference, but because it checks the pci id, which is what they change in the article).

      Well, probably one of the main reasons NVidia doesn't want to open up their drivers.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by evanbd ( 210358 )
        I'm assuming the Quaddro drivers don't require it for no reason, though -- ie they actually use some features in it. What are those?
  • ...than Quadro (workstation) GPUs.

    • Re:Last time I checked geforces got better FPS.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Barny ( 103770 ) on Saturday May 10, 2008 @06:48AM (#23359792) Journal
      That's because the Quadro drivers are optimised for accuracy, since you are using them to do real calculations you will rely on, rather than small-ish floating point which is all the regular gforce allow.

      There are some other things, optimised anti-aliasing for lines, interface layering over the top of render windows, etc.

      For a quick and dirty explanation, see NV docs here [nvidia.com] (warning, pdf file), page 2 onward is where it gets interesting.

  • GPL drivers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by trenien ( 974611 ) on Saturday May 10, 2008 @06:34AM (#23359730)
    I guess this explain the unwillingness from NVidia to release the specs and allow people to make gpl drivers for their cards.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Ant P. ( 974313 )
      It's also proof that hiding your source code only delays the inevitable...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by edwdig ( 47888 )
        Even if it was inevitable, they made a hell of a lot more money before it got figured out.

    • Re:GPL drivers (Score:4, Insightful)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Saturday May 10, 2008 @09:20AM (#23360368) Homepage Journal
      The simple truth is that a lot of the "magic" is in the driver and they want to try to protect this stuff. However, an even simpler truth is that if you release your drivers then the public will help you write them. As intel has stepped into the 3D market with its open source drivers - easy to justify since they're not chasing the #1 spot in quality - the other makers have had to look hard at how their closed source is going to cost them in the long run. Both ATI (AMD) and nVidia have come around to the right idea, and now it's just a question of how long it takes to make their original drivers irrelevant :)

      • Both ATI (AMD) and nVidia have come around to the right idea,
        When did nVidia come around? If there's been any release of technical documentation on their chips, or any promise of it, I've somehow managed to miss the news.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Copid ( 137416 )
        Having ventured into the creepy world of computer graphics drivers (in embedded land), I've found that there's often another issue at work as well. A lot of graphics vendors (at least, a lot of the smaller ones) cross license stuff left and right, so at the end of the day, it's hard to figure out who owns what and who has the right to distribute what data sheets. If A licenses something from company B to make a chip, A often doesn't want to give you the data sheet for fear of raising the ire of B. They t

  • I remember Geforce to Quadro conversion (Score:3, Insightful)

    by flyneye ( 84093 ) on Saturday May 10, 2008 @07:33AM (#23359930) Homepage
    Last time I did that I moved two micro-resistors.
    I just used a jewelers loup and a small tip on my soldering iron.Found the instructions online somewhere.Worked well.

  • Only it doesn't work (Score:5, Informative)

    by da.phreak ( 820640 ) on Saturday May 10, 2008 @07:35AM (#23359936)
    I've had a look at the forum thread linked at the very end of the article. Softmodding only works up to the Geforce 6x00 series. It seems that after that NVidia put in some more checks than only the PCI ID. As reported in the thread, there's no performance increase in professional 3D apps, and OpenGL is broken.

    • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

      by WilyCoder ( 736280 )
      "Softmodding only works up to the Geforce 6x00 series."

      Wrong. Here are instructions for softmodding a Geforce 8800 GTS:

      http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33898714 [rage3d.com]

      Also, the main thing you are paying for with a quadro card is support. You are given access to the driver development team. If you find a bug they will fix it in short time.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by GregPK ( 991973 )
        There are problems though.

        It doesn't work with OpenGL extensions it does accelerate out the Direct 3d extensions though. It's not as fast as the higher memory capacity quadro cards. But its a huge increase over the stock GeForce.

        You still don't get the same tolerances as a standard Quadro. Granted the price is a lot less. But in a Cad Shop where you are consistently working on 200k+projects would you want to take the slightest chance of their being a rendering or upgrade issue? A day there can cost you
  • http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro_geforce.html [nvidia.com]
    The whitepaper says that Quadros have got support for window clipping, hardware accelerated clip planes, antialiased wireframe rendering, more memory, etc. Although it doesn't say if the hardware accelerated features do exist in the GeForce family but are disabled by software.
  • I recall a year ago or so borrow a Quadro 1300 from work (my video card bit the dust), and Civ4 and other games just sucked...until I force-installed the GeForce rather the the Quadro drivers for Windows.

    Not only was it playable now, I could turn the resolution all the way up;)

    Could just be a difference in the age of the drivers though. Quadro drivers are typically much more conservative performance-wise than GeForce ones and thus release changes much more slowly.
  • Can an Nvidia lawsuit be far behind?
  • After getting tired of visual glitches in Autocad and 3DS Max I tried this on my desktop (GeForce 6800) and my laptop (GeForce 7900 Go). The 6800 was the wrong revision and this couldn't be done. However it worked for the laptop in the since that I could install the Quadro drivers from Nvidia's website. What didn't work was installing the MAXtreme and Powerdraft Quadro-only accelerated drivers for Autocad and 3DS Max. They could still detect the card was not a Quadro. The best thing to do if you want to f

  • Ah... (Score:2)

    by Rix ( 54095 )
    This would be why they won't release the source to their drivers, then.

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