Quadro FX 4600 Performance

[cykarushb]

So im looking into rebuilding a budget workstation, as ive gotten back into hobbyist 3D modelling again. Problem is my Athlon 5350 just isnt up to the task for some of it. So i need a GPU.

On ebay i found that Quadro FX 4600's from 2007 are being sold for ~15$ in grade A condition. And yes i know a quadro from 2007 is a bad choice, but considering its performance, the price is really good. Even if spending 20$ more would get me a lot more. Online it seems to be a 8800 GTX but with a different memory configuration. Looking up some performance benchmarks it definitely outclasses the integrated R3 8400 graphics on the athlon, so there will be an improvement. But im wondering exactly how a workstation GPU would benefit a game like SecondLife, being a oddly mesh intensive game, im thinking something like a workstation card would give a benefit over similar performing "gaming" cards such as the GT 720 which is a more modern card on par with it.

Anyone here run older quadro/firepro cards with their respective workstation drivers? Does it give any noticeable performance increase for SL?

[Rolig Loon]

I can only make one mildly relevant comment. I started in SL with an NVidia 8800GTX card in 2007 and had absolutely horrible performance. I traded up to a 9800 GTX within a year because I was so frustrated by the low FPS and the fact that it kept overheating. I do not know anything about the Quadro FX 4600, but if it's comparable to the 8800 GTX, I wouldn't use it myself.  For that price, of course, it's a cheap experiment ....

[cykarushb]

Im just wondering, ive heard before that workstation cards can actually benefit over their gaming counterparts in some specific games and obviously professional applications. Maybe SL would do decently on it since SL is laid out more like a 3D workspace than an optimized game.

And i once ran SL on a core2duo e6700 and a GT 710, and this thing is better than a 710 by a little bit so i think it will perform ok-ish. Still probably not going to be pushing 10fps in crowded sims but if my 5350 on its own with the R3 8400 graphics can do 30fps in places like Social Island then this quadro should be good.

I think the downside is the 10$ you save over just buying a GT 710 comes in the form of the card being ~140w, compared to a GT 710 at 19w.

Looking into it more it seems to actually be closer to an 8800 GTS, not a GTX. Which isnt a massive difference but i might try and borrow a friends GTS from his "retro" windows XP gaming machine to see what the difference is.

https://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-8800-gts/specifications

Whats blowing my mind though, is that the FX 4600 was once a 2000$ card.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro_fx_5600_4600.html

And i got mine for uh, well pic related, though there are some even cheaper, just that this one has a better rated seller than a few others i found. And compared to 8800 GTS's theyre actually about 8-10$ cheaper as well. Maybe if all goes well this could be some insight into people looking to make their own overkill 2007 gaming computers as a hobby.

[Lindal Kidd]

My guess is that it won't perform worth a darn.  Workstation cards are physically similar to their counterpart mass market gaming cards.  The difference is in the drivers.  Workstation cards have drivers that are optimized for a number of popular professional graphics applications, but by no means all of them.

Second Life uses OpenGL.  If a particular card is optimized for OpenGL performance, then you maybe would have something.  Otherwise, you're better off with a more recent GeForce gaming card.

[cykarushb]

Card arrived, gonna have to go ahead and start working on building a 2007 era workstation, because this card will not fit in my case.

Rookie mistake, rip. Probably should've googled the card length, knowing i have a small case.

 

[Nalates Urriah]

5 hours ago, cykarushb said:

Card arrived, gonna have to go ahead and start working on building a 2007 era workstation, because this card will not fit in my case.

Rookie mistake, rip. Probably should've googled the card length, knowing i have a small case.

Let us know how it works...

[cykarushb]

Alright, so an update on this, i basically just went all out to build a 2007 workstation, Core2Quad Q6600, 8gb of DDR2, FX 4600, ive actually got a bunch of 160gb drives for this but im waiting on sata cables.

Using my SSD from my athlon box with 8.1 on it, updated drivers, here we are.

Its surprisingly not that bad at all, note that with the Athlon 5350 on its own was "ok" at best. It was running fairly low settings and not in fullscreen 1080p. This quadro FX 4600 on the other hand paired with the Q6600 is perfectly capable of 1080p to achieve a kinda meh result of 15-20fps in social island with a bunch of people around.

I mean its not bad, its not great though. Its very playable, and reducing my screen size back to its normal little window i played in before bumps that up to 40fps on average with the same settings.

The difference is that it seems to perform about the same anywhere i went, more crowded spaces, less optimized player owned spaces, id still get around 15fps. So theres a GPU bottleneck in play but its not that severe, it means the usual CPU bottleneck everyone else, including me with that athon, ran into is no longer present with even just this Q6600.

 

So tl;dr, 2007 era hardware, totally capable of SL. Just, you need the high end stuff, no Core Solo laptops lol.

[cykarushb]

Even more on this, for anyone who cares, or just wants to build a super low end system for SL. Less complex player run spaces and less populated places run amazingly well. Im getting 35fps+ at this beach for example.

The settings of course arent anything fancy but its very playable and very smooth with these framerates.

I went back to social island and with ~5 or 6 people there i got a decent 25-30fps, i think when i did the above test there may have just some particularly heavy detail avatars around.

Upping the draw distance to 256 drops it to around 30fps, lowering it so 64 (fine for smaller places) brings it up to 40+.

Edited January 11, 2018 by cykarushb