Building a new workstation. Any changes, recommendations? - Page 2

For the post processing. The card needs to be 3D and support OpenGL (and have some substantial speed and power). Normally I wouldn't think about a gaming card, but I've run my applications on a NV 6800 card and they run as good as they do on my Quadro 1400 card (same system). I'm assuming that the 7800 will better than the 6800. Hopefully this will save me a lot of money (versus buying a quadro or two) and still have the performance that I need.

I have no proof of this, but I think that since the 6800 series cards, the gaming cards have the architecture necessary to provide low to mid level workstation graphics capabilities. Before the 6800 series you could bank on a 1.5-2x performance increase over a gaming card with the same based chipset as the workstation card. That's if the gaming card worked at all. Nowadays the gaming cards are working more often than not and are performing very well. There are supposedly some other advantages to the workstation cards such as precision and display accuracy. But, again, I've tried a couple different brands of 6800's and they all perform very well compared to the quadro 1400's that we have which are based on the 6800 chipset. This is just my experience, I don't have anything to back it up except some benchmark numbers and using these cards for almost a year now.