Quadro FX cards are equipped with heavy rendering capabilities than GTX280. So they are much capable for high end Video editing applications.

Some of the features that Quadro FX card have are: - 128-bit color precision - Unlimited fragment instruction - Unlimited vertex instruction - 3D volumetric texture support - 12 pixels per clock rendering engine - Hardware accelerated antialiased points and lines - Hardware OpenGL overlay planes - Hardware accelerated two-sided lighting - Hardware accelerated clipping planes - 3rd generation occlusion culling - 16 textures per pixel in fragment programs - Window ID clipping functionality - Hardware accelerated line stippling. All Gaming GPU's are developed from Quadro's. The Chip of Quadro FX 5800 is used in GeForce GTX 280 (240 shaders). The Chip of Quadro FX 4800 is used in GeForce GTX 260 (192 shaders).

According to nvidia Officials: All Gaming cards are designed for their speed of rendering. While Professional cards for the capability of high resource handling.

And I doubt that you can softmod the 8600, using Riva Tuner strap drivers and a Quadro driver. This, only seems to work for some of the higher end 7 series Geforce cards 7900GS and 7950GT into Quadro FX 3500 for ex. And the older series 6 (6800 cards). Dec 26, 2008 - I dug a bit deeper and have found that most architecture 3d software prefers the nvidia quadro FX series as its GPU. I really dont understand the. Modicon modsoft programmer software.

They produce precise images than gaming/consumer level GPU's. So for a gamer, no need of Professional cards. I think, games can't be played well in Quadros.

Difference is like Xenon Workstation and Core2Extreme. I can't really say how the card will perform, as I don't own one and cannot find gaming benchmarks. I did discover that the Quadro FX 1700 is based of the G84 process.

Notably, this process also spawned the 8600 GTS, 8600 GT and 8400 GS. Given this information, coupled with your question regarding gaming performance, I am speculating that the FX 1700 performs at a level similar to that of its relatives. Lastly, while I could not find gaming benchmarks for the FX 1700, I did find these for other Quadro and FireGL models. (note - link contains $1000+ cards).

I'm building a workstation and want to get into some heavy CUDA programming. I don't want to go all out getting the Tesla cards and have pretty much narrowed it down to either the Quadro 4000 and the GeForce 480, but I don't really understand the difference, on paper it looks like the 480 has more cores 480 vs 256 for the 4000, but the 4000 is almost twice as much the 480 in price. Does someone understand the difference here to justify the higher price. I will be doing scientific computing on it, so everything will be in double precision, if that makes a difference between them. If you neither care about visualization nor rendering (drawing final results on screen e.g. Raytracing) than the answer to your question is slightly more simple, but not trivial. I'm not going to go into detail about the differences between Quadro and GeForce cards, but I will just underline the significant points which can contribute in choosing between them.