Tom’s Hardware takes the new NVidia Quadro 5000 out for a spin and puts it up against the ATI FirePro V8800 to see who wins in the workstation space. The results are no surprise, especially if you paid attention to our earlier review.
Looking at our benchmark results, it’s clear which card comes out on top: Nvidia’s Quadro 5000 is superior to AMD’s FirePro V8800 in almost every benchmark, usually by a clear margin. Based on their mainstream equivalents, we wouldn’t have expected such a great performance disparity between these two graphics boards. After all, AMD’s offering is built on an excellent modern design, though it seems to have trouble living up to its performance potential in a workstation environment.
Indeed, we don’t think that it’s the hardware to blame. After all, the Radeon HD 5870 is faster than the GeForce GTX 465. Rather, it’s AMD’s driver at fault. While they are stable, they are apparently not very well optimized yet, holding the V8800 back. This isn’t just the case compared to Nvidia’s current flagship. The V8800 should have been able to outpace its own predecessor by a much larger margin. AMD’s best approach would be to commit more resources to its driver team to rectify the situation.
Workstation Shootout: Nvidia Quadro 5000 Vs. ATI FirePro V8800 : Introduction.
Optimizing the driver sounds like AMD has not made its homework. Unfortunately most of todays professional CAD and DCC packages relies on very old OpenGL code and these guys are very reluctant to change their code … most probably because they guys who wrote are no longer there …
NVIDIA has recognized this and detects the application and internaly emulates old code to new code. Hard and ugly work but seems to pay off.
When testing full optimized code especially shader stuff the ATI card is faster than the NVIDIA offering, which is really fantastic for ATI since NVIDIA has put some many new and wonderfull stuff inside their fermi offerings.
But as always this race is good for the customers, especially since there is pressure if you compare prices.