Since Nvidia has released Studio Drivers that enable 10 bit output on their latest Geforce Cards too, the line of difference between Quadro and Geforce cards has been blurred. Let’s make it easy to decide what is the right thing for your needs by looking at Geforce vs Quadro comparison.
Geforce cards always represented better value for money in terms of performance. One of the reasons that were keeping Creators from buying these cards was “10 Bit Output”. Professionals such as Photographers, Video editors, Color editors, etc. always wanted 10-bit output for eliminating the banding seen with 8 bits and viewing more colors that could be seen with the naked eye. So now latest Geforce Cards support 10 bit output, is there any reason left for going with Quadro GPUs? Well, Yes!
As the Video Industry is shifting towards higher resolutions like 4k, 6k, and even 8k, the VRAM requirement in GPU takes the top priority. If you’re doing anything bigger than 4k than you will definitely want to go for more than 8GB VRAM. This is where Quadro takes over Geforce Cards as they offer VRAM capacity up to 48GB. Of course you can practice Multi-GPU setup with Geforce Cards but unfortunately, the software currently does not fully utilize their potential.
What Nvidia Has to Say
We recently contacted Nvidia to find out more reasons to choose Quadro Cards over Geforce and they came up with this response –
Not only the drivers on the Quadro Cards are better Optimized for professional Apps like Adobe Premiere Pro, Davinci Resolve, etc, the Hardware is also Optimized which ensures smooth and reliable performance.
If we take a look at the comparison of Quadro RTX 4000 & Geforce RTX 2080 Super, both the cards support 8GB of VRAM and Ray Tracing but the RTX 2080 Super defeats Quadro RTX 4000 in every other comparison and its cheaper!
Quadro RTX 4000 Vs Geforce RTX 2080 Super
| Quadro RTX 4000 | Geforce RTX 2080 Super | |
| CUDA Parallel-Processing Cores | 2,304 | 3072 |
| NVIDIA Tensor Cores | 288 | 384 |
| NVIDIA RT Cores | 36 | 48 |
| GPU Memory | 8 GB GDDR6 | 8 GB GDDR6 |
| RTX-OPS | 43T | 63T |
| Rays Cast | 6 Giga Rays/Sec | 8 Giga Rays/Sec |
| FP32 Performance | 7.1 TFLOPS | 11.15 TFLOPS |
| Max Power Consumption | 160 W | 250 W |
| Graphics Bus | PCI Express 3.0 x 16 | PCI Express 3.0 x 16 |
| Display Connectors | DP 1.4 (3), VirtualLink (1) | DisplayPort, HDMI, DVI-DL |
| Form Factor | 4.4″ (H) x 9.5″ (L) Single Slot | 4.556″ (H) x 10.5″ (L) 2-Slot |
We have been using Geforce Cards and haven’t found any concerning event yet. However, if you do extreme overclocking with your Geforce GPU, you might face an issue due to instability and that’s the reason Quadro GPUs avoid Overclocking facility.
Thus, for small scale productions that require VRAM of up to 11GB, we can safely recommend Geforce cards, especially Geforce 2080 ti. If you do a lot of heavy work with lots of 4k files and above, we advise you to go with Quadro Cards instead of Multi-GPU setup.
Find more on latest GPUs here.
