Other than cost, is there a reason high end computer gaming rigs don’t use industrial graphics cards (think NVIDIA Quadro, e.g.) for better performance?

Question

I’ve been looking to build out a gaming PC and came across these types of graphics cards. Obviously, I’m not spending 10k on a graphics card, but I remember using systems with these types of graphics cards when I did treatment planning for cancer radiation therapy because of the amount of ray tracing over thousands of simulations, and I got to wondering why those with deeper pockets than I have dont just go for broke.

In: Technology

Answer 1

The Quadro and GeForce lines are (generally) based on the same architecture and you likely won’t see an improvement in gaming. The quadro may have some features specific to workstation needs and you are effectively just going to pay a huge premium for those even though you don’t need them. You’ll also likely find that the quadro driver is not at all optimised for gaming, so will very possibly perform worse, and you may find it’s not as simple as just loading a GeForce driver instead.