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Ruben Mariduena avatar image
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Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX vs Quadro

My company and I are looking into acquiring a new workstation for advanced Flexsim simulation purposes. We are looking into running 100-1000 replications on multiple scenarios in models that come with large data sets and heavy animations that we will be displaying for our clients. The Flexsim page states that GeForce GTX cards work the best but that Quadro are also good solutions. What is the difference in using each type of card on Flexsim? which one would work best for large complex simulations and experiments? people here are leaning more towards the Quadro because they have heard it is used in medical simulations where as GTX is used more in gaming

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Ben Wilson answered Ruben Mariduena commented

Both GeForce GTX and Quadro cards will work great with FlexSim, but here are a few reasons that we normally recommend GeForce over Quadro:

  • GeForce is cheaper than Quadro.
  • FlexSim is more game-like than CAD-like - it doesn't take advantage of any workstation-specific features that Quadro includes and GeForce doesn't.
  • Simpler driver configuration: A GeForce card usually has a single latest-and-best graphics driver release. Quadro has many different drivers you can choose from, optimized for different workloads. The GeForce driver's default settings work great, whereas Quadro drivers may need some settings changed in order to get the best FlexSim experience.
  • If the 3D acceleration is only needed for FlexSim, and you won't be using SolidWorks, AutoCAD, or some other similar 3D application, save some money and configuration headaches by just getting the GeForce.

All that said, remember that you'll be able to have just as good an experience with a Quadro as with a GeForce if you determine that is best for your business/use case. You may just need to tweak a few settings, which are detailed at the bottom of this Answers post.

Also, to echo @steven.hamoen, replication instances run in the background and do not use any graphics resources, so it is a completely separate question. To maximize your throughput for experiment replications or for optimization runs, you want to maximize RAM and CPU cores.

See this article for a discussion of various hardware considerations.

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Ruben Mariduena avatar image Ruben Mariduena commented ·

@steven.hamoen @Ben Wilson thank you for the answers

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Steven Hamoen avatar image
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Steven Hamoen answered Ben Wilson commented

@Ruben Mariduena My experience with quadro is a couple of years old (8 to be exactly) but I had at that time quite some problems with the quadro card, especially in the updating of the drivers. While GTX cards get an update every couple of weeks of every 2 or 3 months, I remember that I had to wait almost a year or so for an updated driver. I think GTX is mainstream while Quadro is more for special applications like CAD systems.

Considering that the Flexsim animation is close to gaming I would advice a GTX. Either the 1060 which is quite affordable of 1070 or 1080 if you can afford it.

The other thing is that Flexsim supports Oculus rift and I don't think that works on Quadro cards.

Concerning the replications these are not affected by the graphics card because they run complete in memory on the CPU so get a large processor with a lot of cores to get those done as quick as possible.

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Ben Wilson avatar image Ben Wilson ♦♦ commented ·

VR should work on newer Quadro cards:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro-vr-ready-systems.html

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