Superb test. I was waiting for something like this for years. Any chance we can have a test of some Tesla boards from nVidia? Thank you.

With professional apps relying rather loosely on hardware shaders, its funny to see how little separates the best from the worst performers here. In the gaming world, something similar to the FX4800 would eat the FX580 for breakfast - I guess at 1920x1200 the difference would be something like 1000% in favor of the FX4800 - and now those two cards are generally only 30-40% apart performance-wise! This leads me to think that the FX580 represents some insane value for the performance it offers. Very interesting to read!

Why do I find this review so hard to accept as unbiased?

I hate to question the integrity of the writer, but sure doesn't match what I have read on other sites. Nvidia Quadros do well with some cards in some apps, and AMD FirePro do well in others.

Has anyone checked out any reports from people who actually use the application software for a living ( e.g. http://robrodriguez.com/wordpress/?p=699).


By the way, since when is 10-bit support considered peculiar?

Great review !! Finally a decent overview on how these cards perform with the latest applications instead using these old SPECs over again.

I´d hugely appreciate it if Xbitlabs could compare these results with maybe six consumer cards with the exact same testbed.

I think a lot of people consider working with consumer cards, cost-wise or just wanting to use it for both worlds, work and gaming.
More and more realtime hardware shading with DirectX9 (for example Max2009+) becomes important when working on a scene and I´m not the only one asking himself why for instance a nvidia GTX285 with obviously more horsepower should perform worse than a QuadroFX3800 just because of the drivers. It doesn´t make sense, over the long run and both AMD and nvidia have got to understand it.

Maybe a truthful investigation and comparison from a respected hardware site shall make an impact...

Great review!!

I would also like to see a comparison with consumer cards: it seems like the recent versions of some pro apps (like Maya) don't see such a big difference between a radeon and a firepro

I completely agree with pandemonium! I have been researching what will be the next pro graphics cards in my new workstations, and all the other benchmarks on other sites all give similar results to each other except this review! On other sites ATI’s v8700 and older v7700 sit at the top of the charts in many of the tests, putting most of Nvidia’s newest Quadro cards to shame, although the fx4800 is a top contender in most tests. I am not biased toward ATI or Nvidia and I will buy whatever is the best hardware within my price range, but this review is clearly biased toward Nvidia, putting the v8700 on par with Nvidia’s low-end solutions! Complete BS! The writer of this review is clearly an Nvidia fanboy or taking some serious backhanders from Nvidia or its partners! I noticed at the bottom of this page it states ATI as being one of this sites sponsors. I wonder what AMD/ATI would think about these benchmark results and why they are sponsoring this BS?