Nvidia Quadro4 XGL 750 vs. ATI FireGL8800

From the moment 3dfx disappeared, ATI is the only company that has any kind of ability to compete with Nvidia and to give it a run for its money.

ATI and Nvidia compete with each other in the consumer graphic cards, mobile products, chipset's and the professional graphic card arena.

The workstation market is completely different from the gamers market, and the cards are at a higher order of expense.

Nvidia is quite experienced in this business since along with its sinking partner Elsa, where they already made a mark with the well known Quadro brand.

ATI, on the other hand, chose a different approach to this market. It simply bought well know company FireGL with its very strong brand and continued this line with the well known FireGL2 and FireGL4.

Well we all knew that with as strong chip as the Radeon 8500 was at the time of introduction that ATI would have a professional chip and that's exactly what happened when with the FireGL 8800. Before you draw any kind of conclusion please have in mind that both cards FireGL 8800 and Radeon 8500 are based on the same chip.

Still, this card is way different from Radeon 8500 retail boards since it features a different cooling system and different memory but the chip on both cards are very very similar.

The real power of these cards lies in drivers, heavily optimised for all kind of professional applications including 3D studio Max, Lightwave, Maya3D and also in CAD software.

ATI decided to introduce two cards, the high end one being the FireGL 8800 and the mainstream FireGL 8700 where the main difference is the clock speed and the amount of memory.

Here you can see the Radeon 8500 on the top with 64 MB of memory, and below that the FireGL 8800 which looks quite different. ATI used BGA memory as Nvidia did with Quadro 4 and Geforce 4 cards - excluding 4200. Notice that FireGL 8800 don't have TV out.

Nvidia renewed its professional cards under the Quadro brand, calling the latest the Quadro 4. There never was a Quadro 3, and it seems that the firm decided to follow the Geforce 4 route.

Elsa started to ship Quadro4 750 XGL while we still wait to see 900 cards on market. Nvidia will have two different lines of Quadros - one for professional CAD-CAM users while the other, the Quadro 4 NVS will be used for multiple monitor configurations. There will be two cards Quadro 4 NVS 200 and NVS 400, the first supporting dual displays while the 400 may support as many as four.

As like as three pins are the Geforce 4 Ti 4600, visually very similar to the Quadro 4 750 XGL at the bottom, except that the Quadro uses slower memory. Middle one with two DVIs is the Quadro 4 900 XGL.

The high end Quadro4, the 900, has no competition yet from ATI, and only 3DLabs Wildcat III competes with this baby. It costs around $1,500.

The Quadro4 750 and 700 are meant to compete with the ATI FireGL 8800 cards, targeted for the midrange professional market priced one dollar below $900.

The Quadro4 550 and 500 are less expensive units but include OpenGL acceleration, and probably intended to compete with the 64 MB FireGL 8700.

It's interesting to note that the chips that both ATI or Nvidia use on these extremely expensive cards are as close as close can be to the chips on their consumer products.

You used to be able to turn a Geforce card into a Quadro-clone, but Nvidia now categorically says that this is not possible with the current lines of these products. ATI uses different PCB design as well as memory and it says it's not possible to turn a Radeon 8500 card into a FireGL 8800 clone.

High end testing
It's not a particularly easy task to test these cards but put ourselves in the position of a potential buyer of these products.

Of course you can't just run Quakes and Unreal on these cards but need professional applications. We used two applications, 3D Studio Max 4.2 and some of its built in tests and we used the Combustion 2.0 tool for creating special effects. We built two demos Waterfall and Explosion and measured the average FPSs.

The third part of our testing was based on the well known and heavily used Spec ViewPerf 6.12 set of six OpenGl tests that may give you impression how your card will work in six different CAM CAD areas.

We paid big attention to stability of the cards during testing and in some normal everyday use, and we also looked at dual display features since this is what might be useful in this business.

We tested the cards on:

NEC Multisync FP 1355 22 inch display (primary)
LG 17 inch display as (Secondary)
Athlon XP 2000+ processor
256 MB DDR PC 2100 Crucial 2.5 CL
Epox 8KHA+ motherboard based on KT266A
Maxtor 40 GB HDD
LiteON 16x10x40 CD-RW
Windows XP

We decided to try Geforce 4 4600 on this tests as well. In Spec Viewperf 6.12 and 3D studio 4.2 Geforce 4 Ti 4600 rock the mountains just a little behind Quadro4 900.

When we used Combustion, even the mighty Gainward Geforce 4 Power pack 750 - the fastest of all Geforce 4s - wasn't able to get even one frame per second! The chip may be the same but not the drivers and the Geforce 4 driver just could not run that good so many particles that we used on test - just imagine how many particles you need to have realistic waterfall or constant triple explosions.

Results
In 3dmark 2001 SE first of our applications that we used here is what we got

In overall testing, Fire GL 8800 is significantly slower in overall result which is exactly the same situation that you will get if you compare 8500 vs. GF 4, since this generation of Nvidia cards has faster memory.

As we mentioned before, the Quadro4 900 is out of the competition here but still FireGL 8800 was almost as fast as this Quadro4 900. This test represents impressive features of DX 8 where FireGL 8800 where able to perform slightly better than Quadro4 750 XGL. FireGL 8800 was 4 FPS of 9 percent.

FireGL is clocked 250/250 but it's as fast as a Geforce 4 while, the Radeon 8500 had about 10 FPS slower results than we saw from Quadro4 750.

In pixel shader 1.1 test the Quadro4s are significantly faster then FireGL.

With advanced pixel shader we had a different story. Nvidia, even with Geforce 4, does not have support for pixel shader 1.4. Pixel shader 1.3 cards such as Quadro4 will scale down and use 1.1 and will run the test just fine with the proviso that some of the scenes or textures will be rendered in two passes. Even rendering twice, some things Quadro is faster while strange results on 900, I may comment as luck of driver optimisation since cards are not made specifically for this.

In the vertex shading test FireGL is 10 FPS slower than Quadro4 750 while fastest Quadro 4 900 dominate this test. We could expect even bigger margins from the Quadro since it has two vertex shaders.

We did this just to see how these cards are performing and we may say that you will be able to play on these cards all DirectX 8 titles that are out or will be out and have a fast performance. Still those cards are to expensive for games but we test this in advantages or all our friends, game developers, that would like to play on this cards after busy day or making a new title.

Spec Viewperf 6.12
The second part of testing that we used was based on the famous Spec set of benchmarks that is based on six different OpenGL test as a simulation of real world work where you have rendering wire frame models, rendering models with textures, rotation, and some work with light, house model animations and others.

Quadro4 900 rocks in this test! You can clearly see how Quadro4 750 is faster than FireGL 8800 but Quadro 900 outperforms both cards for 3 and even four times. This is not what you can expect in real life.

The second part of Spec where we see rotation and work with complex view frame model of factory we had completely different picture. Quadro4 750 is about 18 percent faster. Quadro4 900 is faster about 18 percent faster from Quadro4 750 and about 35 per cent from the FireGL 8800.

The third part of Spec is based on some kind of rotating model in many variations. The Fire Gl is about 14.5 percent slower than its competitor, while Quadro4 900 is significantly faster.

The fourth test is based on lights that are traditionally very hard to calculate. You fly through a house that has complex lighting. FireGL is 28 percent slower that its competitor while 900 is just few percent faster.

The fifth part of test is simulation of working with model of copy machine where you have fly around, wire frame, and rotation of model. FireGL 8800 is about 22 percent slower here while 900 is not so significantly better than 750.

The final part of this test is working with a pick up model and here are the results.

Stability and optimisation
Both Nvidia and ATI pointed out that it would be faster to test this cards on P4 platforms but we still decided to work with Athlon especially bearing in mind that the Athlon has much faster rendering in many cases since it has a better FPU unit. ATI confirmed that "there is still some space" for Athlon optimisation that may come in the next driver revisions.

Still, you need to bear in mind that almost seventy percent of the workstation PC's are based on Intel P4 and Xeon processors and we will hopefully run some of this test on Intel platform but the only functional Intel boards that we have here are DDR ones. We are looking forward to try these boards on i850 or i850E in the near future.

Both cards are amazingly stable and we haven't experienced not even one crash during many days of testing and working with those cards.

When we talk about dual display capability I must say that Nvidia Nview solution has a richer set of features.

Nview is the same one that you can find in Geforce 4 MX and TI' so there is nothing new here. Hydravision works just as well as Nview and you will have nice and easy dual display space to work. Quadro4 900 is equipped with two DVI outs that can be easily used for VGA displays as well though the dongles and this is only option where you can use two flat screens. 750 and FireGL 8800 have one VGA one DVI out.

After this massive test we tried one complex and commercially used animations where we were able to run wire frame with about 10 to 15 FPS while gamer card on same platform could not get not even one FPS. Gamer card rendered just one frame ahead long time and you can not even imagine any kind of movements. So this definitively proves that these cards are worthy.

3D Studio Max 4.2
We used 3dmax 4.2 since we find this application pretty useful and heavily used by our game developer friends. We used build in demos that you can find inside this application.

We used the Antarctica demo since its representing now technique that is about to become standard in DX 9.1 that we all expect. Developers use this for generating terrains. Even chart didn't make how we wanted you can see that all cards are performing almost identically. 0.5 frames per second are marginal differences that should be discounted.

If you try the Dragon that Spills the Fire test you will get better results on Quadros where the Quadro is 40 percent faster than FireGL which is the biggest performance boost we saw on this test.

On the Flying Dragon tables have turned since FireGL performs better than 750 one and its just about to match 900! This time Quadro4 750 is 14 percent slower than FireGL.

Rabbit is a very complex model that talks and you can see that all tree cards where very close with its performance in this demo.

Combustion
We used Combustion 2.0 tool and its particles part where we made some custom tests of waterfall and triple explosions.

In the first test FireGL 8800 21 percent slower than 750. With first revision of drivers we had strange results where Quadro 900 where slower from 750 one but that disappear with new revision of drivers. Quadro 900 rocks the mountains with particles.

In constant explosion float we saw that Quadro 4 750 can do this operation about thirty percent faster. Quadro 900 is a bit faster than its 750 brother.

Conclusion
Quadro 4 750 performs better than FireGL 8800 but you won't be disappointed if you buy either of these cards.

On the Pentium 4 platforms, any differences become negligible, and the cards are much more competitive but one of these days ATI will drop us new drivers with significantly faster Athlon performance. There is one big advantage that the ATI card holds and that is 2D picture quality. If you care about 2D quality and slower 3D you should go for ATI.

FireGL 8800 runs much cooler than Quadro but the Quadro4 is a very stable card.

The Quadro4 900 is the fastest but the most expensive of the cards we looked at but professionals will go for this one, even though it's price is around $1,500.

If you want to model, work with particles - water, explosions, grass, do animation loops, and you are spending hours doing this with some consumer cards, do yourself a favour because even the slowest one is leagues beyond consumer cards.

ATI FireGL 8800 - $899
Elsa Quadro4 XGL 750 - $899
Elsa Quadro4 XGL 750 - $1600