Myth:
Professional (Quadro) cards are better than gaming (Geforce) cards:
There are big differences when comparing a workstation video card to a high-end 3D game card. Workstation cards are used to design and create the environments and characters seen in games, on the other hand, gaming boards are designed to play the games. The graphic requirements for games are focused on achieving high frame rates when running at full screen.
Workstation users, on the contrary, usually work with very complex programs that run wire-frame, rendered and shaded models in different windows all at the same time. Also, the actual program interface such as windows, menus and toolbars need to be displayed on the screen along with the 3D models.
Workstation cards are designed to handle very large files that contain millions of polygons compared to a few thousand polygons found on average game graphics and are optimized for optimum OpenGL performance.
OpenGL is the most widespread graphics programming interface that is extensively used by CAD and 3D modeling applications. These cards are certified by independent software vendors to assure compatibility with their applications.
(taken from Alienware site)
In short, while you may game on a "faster" Quadro card this does not mean that your benchmarks will go through the roof. Depending on the game, you may even get slower framerates or not the exact gaming quality on a professional card.
The same applies to processors, I've seen some people buying professional processors for playing because they are "faster" (Opteron, Xeon) but had problems running certain games because the games were optimized to run on mainstream processors and video cards.
Check the Alias site:http://www.alias.com/eng/support/may...ya_85_win.htmlNvidia GeForce GPUs
There are many cards based on GeForce GPU chipsets. Nvidia and Autodesk do not recommend these cards for use with Maya as you may experience various refresh, display and stability problems and inadequate performance. We suggest you choose from Nvidia's workstation cards instead, such as the Quadro families which are much better suited to high-end 3D packages such as Maya.
