NVidia Quadro versus GeForce - my own experience

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For some time now I've been wondering which video card would work best for photo editing tasks using Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop and such. With background in IT, I'd narrowed my choices to those cards with which I've had the most experience -- nVidia Quadro and GeForce display adapters.

I've always heard that vector drawing applications like CAD, and assumedly apps like Adobe Illustrator, benefit most from the Quadro cards, while gaming applications, or those requiring response to quickly changing textures, benefit most from the gaming cards like the GeForce. The Quadro cards are substantially more expensive than the GeForce cards for the amount of memory you get on them, the Quadros found mostly in high performance workstations and not so much on consumer or gaming machines.

I finally had a chance to make a rudimentary comparison for myself using the GeForce 7600GT with 256MB memory, and the Quadro NVS 285 with 128MB memory, both PCI Express 16 display adapters. I was really surprised by the results, actually.

At the office, I saw firsthand a substantially noticeable increase in performance in CAD by going to the NVS 285 from the 7600GS (note the difference here) 256MB card. The user corroborated this for me as well. This was especially surprising given that the NVS card had half the memory of the GeForce card, even though I'd always heard that the Quadros outperform gaming cards for CAD and other vector applications.

I was using the 7600GT myself with pretty nice performance, but curious about the NVS 285, I removed the drivers and the GeForce card and installed the 285 card with a new driver set. I compared the peformance of the two by running a couple of quick tests consisting of typical Lightroom and Photoshop editing routines, these two being about the weightiest applications I use. The 285 was surprisingly sluggish. I'd expected to see the boost in performance I'd seen in the CAD application at the office, but quite the opposite -- I mean, it was SLOW! To see it, you'd wonder if I'd been using an onboard 8MB Intel adapter! It was that bad. I put the GeForce 7600 back in with the respective driver set, ran the same routines, and it was flying, like on the order of nearly instantaneous whereas the Quadro card was slower and choppier.

I know these aren't anywhere close to controlled lab testing situations, and that even the differing memory on the cards may have something to do with it, but I believe the results to be reasonably valid with respect to use with image editing applications. The 256MB GeForce card can be had for less than the 128MB NVS card, yielding better performance for photo editing applications for the money.

Just a few notes for anyone who's ever wondered which type to use, and/or been on the fence wondering if it would be worth spending the money on the Quadro card for photo editing apps.