| Mobile Professional GPUs Performance Chart |
by Dreamer
"The screen is a window through which one sees a virtual world.
The challenge is to make that world look real,
act real, sound real, feel real."
Ivan Sutherland
Here, we are going to talk about a different class of graphics cards usually referred as "professional" and designed for specific markets. Basically, there are two type of professional solutions offered on the mobile market at the moment. First of them are business cards, compatible with the latest business applications, which main purpose is to offer a reliable hardware and software platform for a stable business environment. The second category, which is the main target of this guide, are workstation cards turned to professional markets for industrial design, CAD and engineering, digital content creation, animation and special effects.
Business video cards are designed for professional 2D applications such as:
- General Purpose Business and Corporate
- Financial Trading
They are optimized for clearer image quality and more stable performance, and have different features for smooth video playback. Business cards pass rigorous compatibility testing with all major financial and corporate applications. Moreover, they are fully compliant with professional OpenGL and DirectX applications.
Performance Chart
bus.jpg
(click image for lager version)
Note: All professional cards come with "high-speed" GDDR3 graphics memory in contrast to their consumer counterparts, which could also have "cost-competitive" DDR2 versions resulting in lower performance.
| Workstation Graphics Cards |
Workstation graphics cards are optimized and certified for professional 3D applications such as:
- Computer-Aided Design (CAD)
- Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE)
- Mechanical Computer-Aided Design (MCAD)
- Digital Content Creation (DCC)
- Non-Linear Video Editing (NLE)
- Visualization Applications
They are targeted primarily at OpenGL professional applications and support hardware acceleration for certain operations as well as some additional features used in professional applications. Workstation cards also come with specific OpenGL drivers built for maximum image quality and pixel precision and optimized for the corresponding professional applications.
Hardware acceleration along with driver optimizations usually result in significantly improved viewport performance over consumer card in professional OpenGL based applications. Moreover, all professional hardware and software from the graphics card makers is certified by the 3D application developers to ensure that they will work flawlessly in these tasks. These cards are usually announced as ISV certified when ISV stands for Independent Software Vendor.
The systems that have workstation cards can similarly be certified by ISVs, and the certification software vendors provide assures consumers that the programs a workstation has been certified for will run effectively on those machines. In other words, the system must be stable and fast enough to perform all of the tasks require by the application and to be free of compatibility-based errors and bugs and deliver high performance workstation graphics environment on both Windows and Linux platforms.
ISV Certified Mobile Workstations
14.1"
ThinkPad T60p (ATI Mobility FireGL V5250)
ThinkPad T61p (NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M*)
* Version with a 64 bit memory interface, different from the 15.4" models
Dell Precision M2300 (NVIDIA Quadro FX 360M)
Dell Precision M2400 (Quadro FX 370M)
15.4"
Dell Precision M65 (NVIDIA Quadro FX 350M)
ThinkPad Z61p (ATI Mobility FireGL V5200)
ThinkPad T60p (15/15.4) (ATI Mobility FireGL V5250)
HP Compaq nw8440 (ATI Mobility FireGL V5200)
Fujitsu Siemens Celsius H240 (ATI Mobility FireGL V5200)
Dell Precision M4300 (NVIDIA Quadro FX 360M)
ThinkPad T61p (NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M)
HP Compaq 8510w (NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M/ATI Mobility FireGL V5600)
Fujitsu Siemens Celsius H250 (NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M)
ThinkPad W500 (ATI Mobility FireGL V5700)
HP EliteBook 8530w (ATI Mobility FireGL V5700/NVIDIA Quadro FX 770M)
Dell Precision M4400 (NVIDIA Quadro FX 770M/1700M)
Fujitsu Siemens Celsius H265/H270 (NVIDIA Quadro FX 770M)
17"
HP Compaq nw9440 (NVIDIA Quadro FX 1500M)
Dell Precision M90 (NVIDIA Quadro FX 1500M/2500M/3500M)
HP Compaq 8710w (NVIDIA Quadro FX 1600M/3600M)
Dell Precision M6300 (NVIDIA Quadro FX 1600M/3600M)
ThinkPad W700 (NVIDIA Quadro FX 2700/3700M)
HP EliteBook 8730w (ATI FireGL V5725/NVIDIA Quadro FX 2700M/3700M)
Dell Precision M6400 (NVIDIA Quadro FX 2700M/3700M)
Performance Chart
work.jpg
(click image for lager version)
Note: All professional cards come with "high-speed" GDDR3 graphics memory in contrast to their consumer counterparts, which could also have "cost-competitive" DDR2 versions resulting in lower performance.
A few words about gaming performance
Even though workstation graphics cards are based on the same cores as consumer cards, they still differ from the gaming solutions. One of the major differences is the optimizations for different applications implemented in the drivers. Professional applications don’t need funky visualization technologies, which are popular in the latest 3D games, but require maximized geometric performance and texturing speed instead. Their gaming performance with
the professional drivers is usually relatively worse compared to the performance of their consumer counterparts. Some games may have compatibility issues with these cards due to the fact that the professional drivers are meant to be stable and they are not updated as often as the regular ones.
However, if consumer drivers are installed on workstation or business cards instead of professional, then they should have similar gaming performance as consumer cards assuming that they are clocked similarly and have the same amount/type of dedicated memory.
Synthetic Benchmarks
Workstations cards need specific OpenGL benchmarks designed to evaluate their performance in different kinds of professional applications. The most popular of them is called
SPECviewperf, which runs a number of viewsets that come from the ISVs themselves and are focused on popular high-end CAD/CAM, visualization and digital content creation applications.
Links
NVIDIA Quadro NVS Series | NVIDIA Quadro FX Series | Nvidia Product Literature | ATI FireGL Series
Mobile Professional GPUs Performance Chart
