Hi,

I’ve just finished a live interactive video performance gig last week, and thought I’d do some benchmarking on the machines that were lent to us, just for fun.

Here’s the background to the question that follows.

HP lent us two identical machines (twin 2.8GHz Pentium Xeons, 1.5GB of ram each). One has an NVIDIA Quadro4 980XL graphics card (128MB DDR ram), and one has a GeForce4 Ti4600 card (also 128MB DDR ram). Windows XP on both.

I’m absolutely gobsmacked. I did some benchmarking with 3dMark 2003, and the Geforce4 beats the Quadro4 by about 15-20% on average on just about everything. In fact, the machine with the quadro scored 1638, and the Geforce4 scored 1903.

I also tried a few things in photoshop, and found that the difference in performance ranges from hardly noticeable to about 20-25% longer to process on the Quadro4.

Now, from what I understand the Quadro4 is a top of the range card for workstation applications, and the GeForce 4 Ti4600 was top of the gaming cards maybe 18 months ago.

Can anyone explain why the GeForce4 outperforms the Quadro4?

The corollary question: would I be able to get better performance out of the Quadro4 than the Geforce undex linux, using GEM? If so, how?

Many thanks.

- martin

p.s. If there are any other people who would be interested in sharing performance benchmarks running gem on different cards and configurations, let me know.