The first thing we want to point out is that the 6800GS refused to finish the tests at anything but its 475MHz stock clock speed. The system kept shutting down/halting due to overheating issues. Well, perhaps these cards aren’t built with as much robustness as the Quadros.

In the 3D application test, the 6800GS was way out of its league, as the results clearly present. Except for Ensight01, where the Quadro is only marginally ahead, the Quadro beats, no, decimates the 6800GS with a huge margin. In almost all tests, the FX3400 has scored nearly double or more than the 6800GS.

The reasons for this are quite a few. The Quadro FX is actually quite similar to a GeForce FX card in regards to the basic architectural design. This is in terms of DirectX 9.0 support, and of course the OpenGL implementation, pixel/vertex shaders and pixel/vertex pipelines. There are, however, some differences between the two cards, which makes them stand apart and ensure that the Quadro FX gets a line of its own.

First of all, the Quadro FX GPUs have hardware support for antialiased lines. This is critical for wire frames in 3D modeling (which is what such a card would be used for in the first place) and other such applications. Things get better when you realize that the Quadro GPU does this without taking up too much extra video RAM (for oversampling), or taking that much of a performance hit when you choose to view in this mode.

This should not be confused with the FSAA we see in the GeForce FX series. That works for shaded polygons, which the Quadro GPU doesn’t seem to be too interested in.

The second difference is related to the Quadro's memory management techniques. There seems to be some serious optimizations which ensure that that even in multiple windows and different applications running concurrently (as you would expect in a design/graphics environment), the Quadro can manage the resources optimally. In contrast, while playing a game, you have just one window and there is almost never any window switching (within an application itself), and in that sense, Quadro’s memory management is more dynamic.

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