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It may be a marketing con, but if you buy your $30,000 engineering package and expect it to run on your gamer GPU, you may need to do some video card firmware h

It may be a marketing con, but if you buy your $30,000 engineering package and expect it to run on your gamer GPU, you may need to do some video card firmware hacking to make that happen. And then, of course, you won't be able to get any customer support from the software vendor for any visual glitches which may appear. Sucks, but that's how it is -- workstation GPUs _are_ better, generally not in terms of FPS in Crysis, but in terms of out-of-the-box compatibility with off-the-shelf high end software packages.

vacri 13y ago
I just remember that at my last work, the hardware designer was using Solidworks for his CAD work, and the single-threaded rendering was an issue. There was an active community looking for the best cards to do that rendering on, and moderately high-level gaming cards did significantly better than the 'workstation' cards by Matrox and similar. I don't know what price tier Solidworks is in, but looking at their site now, it's in the "get a quote" category, so they're not a consumer-level bit of software.
mahyarm 13y ago
If you are in the rare software segment with $30k software, then the extra $1000 or $2000 to indirectly get hardware drivers & firmware that confirm with your $30k software is not a big cost. BUT, there are large segments that do not need those special drivers in their software set and are restricted by circumstance to use OS X only, such as iOS developers. Or just people who want high performance GPUs with their mac who don't need the FirePro feature set. There are also many software packages that do GPGPU or OpenCL just fine with consumer segment GPUs too. I would of loved it if it was a mac pro with dual CPUs vs. dual GPUs for example, something you really can't physically get without the xeon level chipset, even though we all know it's very possible with a consumer chipset.

vacri 13y ago

I just remember that at my last work, the hardware designer was using Solidworks for his CAD work, and the single-threaded rendering was an issue. There was an active community looking for the best cards to do that rendering on, and moderately high-level gaming cards did significantly better than the 'workstation' cards by Matrox and similar. I don't know what price tier Solidworks is in, but looking at their site now, it's in the "get a quote" category, so they're not a consumer-level bit of software.

mahyarm 13y ago

If you are in the rare software segment with $30k software, then the extra $1000 or $2000 to indirectly get hardware drivers & firmware that confirm with your $30k software is not a big cost. BUT, there are large segments that do not need those special drivers in their software set and are restricted by circumstance to use OS X only, such as iOS developers. Or just people who want high performance GPUs with their mac who don't need the FirePro feature set. There are also many software packages that do GPGPU or OpenCL just fine with consumer segment GPUs too. I would of loved it if it was a mac pro with dual CPUs vs. dual GPUs for example, something you really can't physically get without the xeon level chipset, even though we all know it's very possible with a consumer chipset.