Maya 6 - 7900GT or 6800 Ultra -> QuadroFX 4000

IMHO, driver develpement costs for "pro" cards are not the cause of higher prices. It's mostly the process of certification of the drivers for each ISV that is costly, so i guess that's why NVIDIA wants to charge for it by selling you a "pro" card.

 

false perceptions

The driver development cost is not the issue, or even close. No way "certification" justifies the price. In many ways the support of professional software is much easier as it uses basically the same engine year after year and closely adheres to OpenGL spec. “Pro” drivers don’t have to support a bunch of crazy DX9 calls, crazy memory swapping, etc. Game engines do both quantitative and qualitatively innovative pushing of the envelope.

"Pro" features are mostly fluff now, or stuff easy to implement in the occasional OpenGl driver releases. What pro applications use is mostly qualitative, like more wire-frame, more shaded polys, etc. But none of that stuff is intellectually that difficult to implement in drivers or get certified, especially on the same engine year after year, and the HW is the same.



The “pro” pricing model is built on the public perception from a decade ago when a "pro" card actually had a totally different chip, an order of magnitude or more memory, and very different HW features, when "pro" users came to expect paying 10x much.

Econ 101: Pricing = supply and demand. Supply cost may be cheap, but if the demand is high, or perceived to be high, then prices can skyrocket and you have a very profitable product. Also known as gouging.

 

Ok guys, first I have to apoligize for the incredibly long delay in posting these results. A lot of things have been making it impossible for me to sit down and come up with more benchmarks. Again, sorry for this wait if you are looking forward to this information.

I have a few comparisons on PaintFX, HW particle rendering, and new wireframe comparisons. I couldn't really determine the proper way of doing real-time normal mapping in Maya 6 so I haven't done any tests on that. Real time shadows are extremely buggy on both cards and I can't figure out a good way to test it because of this.


Results overview:
With a huge number of polygons, Q4000 is almost a full 3X faster than 7900UC in smooth wireframe mode. Regular wireframe and solidshade MAY be faster as well, but with inconsistencies from one bench run to another I would chalk these 3 second differences up to margin-of-error.

PaintFX appears identical.

HW particle rendering is faster on the 7900.

Code:

All tests were performed using Nvidia 91.47 driver.
V-Sync disabled.
Maya 6.01
E6600 @ 3.0GHz, 2GB memory @ 667MHz 4-4-4-12
Windows XP Pro

My custom benchmarks: Timed with stopwatch so expect a margin of error


Custom Wiretest02 -
	8.24 million polys in scene, 8 - 8.24m on screen
	400 x spheres@19,800 poly ea. + 4 planes@80,000 poly ea.
	default lighting
	Camera rotates around scene over 450 frames

		6800U->Q4000		7900UC
Wireframe		1:13:63 sec		1:16:76 sec
Smooth Wireframe	1:14:44 sec		3:27:82 sec
Solidshade		1:13:25 sec		1:13:25 sec


PaintFXTest1
	Test consisted of perspective view of a large mass of painted trees.
	Camera rotate around scene.
	Identical: 5.9 fps average both cards

PaintFXTest2
	Tested various brushes painting across blank canvas
	Timed how long it took to scroll across the screen while still maintaining a smooth framerate (eye tested)
	Times were identical.
	May need to test more brushes.

HWParticles1
	5 particle emitters, 500 parts/sec, 200 speed, blinn shaded w/transparency, 1 streak type, 1 point type, 1 sphere type, 1 multi-streak type, 1 multi-point type.
	Tested rendering frames 450-900 in Hardware Render Buffer.  640x480, full resolution, anti-aliased, default lighting

6800U->Q4000 :	2:16:63
7900UC:		1:58:41

 

Thanks for the results Augie,
so it seems that to beat a 7900 in Maya you would need to purchase at least a 4500 or better a 5500 Well unworth the price :thumbdown

Ciao

Ps I would be curious to know how the most recent firegl perform in maya. Have the ati drivers improved? My latest personal test was on a x850xt platinum agp (if I rember correctly the number) taken to x3 on 8.103 drivers and it was a pity in Maya compared to my 5900xt.

 

Very nice testing, augie!

My guess would be that "Smooth Wireframe" is 3x faster on the 6800->Q4000 because
the Quadro drivers support hardware antialiasing in OpenGL.. or?

About the HWParticles1 test, on the 6800->Q4000..
did you try both with overlay planes on and off?
If I remember correctly, in the old versions of Maya, it was said that
you should set it on if you needed Artisan (PaintFX etc) and
you should set it off if you needed HW Particles..

 

I was wondering what driver everyone using for their quadro mod? which one is a fast and stable? I'm on 81.67 and it seems okay, but I was wondering if any of the newer version are faster?

 

very interesting

So that proves it: Nvidia "pro" capabilities are really over rated.

The "game" card does everything as well with the exception of AA wireframe in very dense scenes. So what? Go shaded or turn off AA for your 4+ mil poly scenes. (who looks at 4+ mil in wireframe anyways?! that's 2x poly for every pixel in my screen!)

Game OpenGL drivers have obviously been slightly hobbled, deliberately, to justify the "pro" line of cards. It could only be more blatant if they hobbled OpenGL entirely, but then they'd stink on OpenGL game benchmarks. Thank goodness for OpenGL games.

Regardless, it seems the major bottleneck is the CPU and that slight performance gains on card are negligable in real-world tests. That makes ATI's slightly inferior OpenGL performance a very appealing choice for real world use. I suspect an ATI 19xx card will equal the Nvidia Maya real-world performance, with a 19xx SoftFireGL perhaps beating the Softquadro 68xx or 7xxx game card.

I'm sick of the Nvidia business model and proprietary technology like SLI.

 

I periodically upgrade to the latest popular driver on Guru3D and only downgrade to "certified" drivers if I have a problem. But that hasn't happened in a while.

In general Nvidia driver updates are overdone and exaggerated in usefulness. Only about 1/10 of their available driver updates are meaningful, and only because they address specific issues with specific games. For a pro user anything from 42 to the latest is pretty much going to work the same. For a gamer the latest and greatest may eek out ~2% more performance but that's about it.

 

Is there a way to make a hard mod card?