Quote Originally Posted by mbox_bob View Post
Depending on what you are doing in your CAD programs, you may get some rather rubbish performance from the consumer card This depends on the programs you are using and in some cases (e.g. AutoCAD) which addons you happen to be running, and the work you are actually doing within those applications.

Despite a lot of opinion to the contrary, there are some actual hardware differences between the consumer GPU's and the "Professional" GPU's, although these might be relatively minor, but they are definitely aimed at moving certain functions that would normally only be performed in professional apps to the hardware, rather than software rendered. Certain applications also only allow access to specific rendering settings if you happen to be running the professional GPU drivers. You used to be able to modify the consumer GPU's to accept the professional drivers, which would increase the performance of the consumer card, although not to the level of the professional card, which had the hardware support for some functions, but in the testing of old, it would sometimes show a 200% odd increase over an unmodded consumer GPU, and then the prof GPU on top with another 200% perf increase again.

On the other hand, gaming on a professional card has increased in performance dramatically, although they tend to not have the optimised settings that you get in the consumer cards, and the clockspeeds tend to be lower off the bat, and they are just not really designed to get as hot so you hit the ceilings a lot.

The best of both worlds would be to have an "affordable" middle of the road professional card and a nice gaming card for the down time. Only really applies if you happen to be using applications/features that would actually benefit greatly from a prof card - i.e. something that takes 5 seconds on a consumer card, but 1 second on a professional card may not seem like much of a compromise, except if you happen to hit that same feature 10 times a minute, 4 hours a day. You can usually get them to play nice in the same system; this sometimes takes a bit of initial grunt work determining slots/settings/drivers and cables. Usually a monitor with dual inputs works well or some kind of signal switch, so you can change over cards when you want to (reboots usually ensue). Ability to disable slots in the BIOS can help immensely in some cards.

YMMV. Dual use in the CAD/3D world, with gaming, always comes down to tradeoffs, and some investigation into what you are actually doing.
I appreciate this post.

What I find frustrating with Autodesk is hard to find information. As an example:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet...anuf=all&opt=1

then they clause it with this:
Autodesk certification testing focuses on workstation-grade hardware, as identified by the hardware vendor. Testing and designation as Certified or Recommended does not guarantee that a particular device is workstation-grade or that it will meet a user's particular needs. Test results are valid only for the tested combination of hardware and driver. Certified or Recommended status does not guarantee that the hardware will perform acceptably with other drivers.

Again, thanks for this post. I will do a little more research. I remember doing this a few years ago with Autodesk.