Alright, on this cool wednesday morning, i began to realise that people who are building new computers have some queries about their video cards.
When building computers, people tend to question: What is the difference between a gaming card and a workstation video card? And i am going to try my best to explain to you the difference.
Firstly, you need to know that the gaming graphics cards are designed to run your games at high speed. For example, the 4870x2 runs at 750mhz, and they have massive memory, like 2gb of GDDR5 running at high speed. The reason for the gaming cards to be running at such a high speed is because the want to be able to run your games with all the details, gun shots, bullets, at high speed, ensuring good playback - which are like mostly direct 3D, thus, if your core clock is slower, you are not able to run the demanding games(like crysis) very well.
As it runs at high clock rates, it means that it runs hot(like the 4870x2, 4870). The disadvantage of this is that if you casing does not have sufficient cooling, you might have overheating problems - this will lead to artifacts and damage to your graphics card, if things gets quite serious, there might be crashing issues. On the other hand, people who game a lot dun actually play their games for eight hours at one go, maybe some crazy people like me will run crysis or 3dmark06 w/o giving your system a break.
Now, with comparison to the work station graphics card. Workstation graphics card tend to have a slower clock rate. Now you might wonder why you are paying a few thousand bucks to get sth that runs slower. First and foremost, people who are using the workstation graphics card are designing and rendering their products after days in front of the 30inch monitor, they dont want their graphics card to crash halfway. That might be the reason behind the slower clock rate (less speed, less heat, more stable). As those who do a lot of rendering will know, you are dealing with OpenGL and other kind of maths calculation while rendering. The workstation graphics card is built to deal with those complicated maths calculation, while the gaming graphics card deal with another type of maths.
Workstation graphics card are designed to design . Workstation graphics card can support up till very very high resolution, like 3840x2400. You dun find them on gaming cards. Another feature is the full screen anti-aliasing.They also have the feature of being able to do the more heavy work instead of the CPU doing it. This will means a faster processing. WHich also says that your project is done faster.
Overall, workstation are built for rendering, while gaming are build to run all the directX10s and fanciful graphics at high speed.
I will try to update more whn i come across more article on this
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Folding@Home eh? I remember it's for nvidia only rite? ATI 1 still under development? or under diff name? i forget liao...
Remember Nvidia release some slug demo to showcase it's ability... then there's the particle flow 1... heard review of it not that spectacular, but novel...
i duno lea, i no use workstation card
folding @ home is just use ur comp to help do some stuff then send up to them ar?
Hmmm... but i remember got somewhere have some sort of cuda for gaming card 1... think it's a hacked cuda... handy for 3D model making?
im not sure about it
i read somewhere that u can hack the gaming card to work for rendering, or u can hack the rendering to game
i dunno whichi is it