CM on NVIdia Quadros NVS 140M

[GreenAsJade]

Will CM run on NVidia Quadros NVS 140M ?

Any more general thoughts on this card: it is what comes in the Dell D830, which I am considering buying as my "do everything work/play" machine.

Are there driver/performance issues for modern games with this "business" oriented card.

(If only Dell made Lattitudes with GeForce cards, but they don't )

Thanks!

GaJ

[Schrullenhaft]

I don't have an absolute answer on this, but my guess is that, yes, it should work with the CMx1 series and possibly CMSF.

The Quadros are basically the same hardware as GeForce GPUs. They typically have a slightly different BIOS and possibly a slightly different GPU (for identification purposes usually). In the past there have been hacks for converting desktop GeForces into their equivalent Quadro counterparts (via Video BIOS updates and driver hacks). I'm not sure if people continue to do this today (it may be a bit harder to accomplish).

Quadros are basically marketed to business professionals for either CAD/design/animation or guaranteed performance with certain applications for business. On some business related / CAD benchmarks the Quadros can often out perform their GeForce brethren, though this may be more of a marketing decision enforced by some technology by Nvidia rather than an actual hardware difference accounting for the performance difference. Anyway, the Quadros should work with games based on DirectX and OpenGL (though they may not perform exactly as well as the equivalent GeForce, possibly).

The Quadro NVS 140M is a 'turbo cache' model, which means it is using a 'shared memory' scheme for some or all of its video memory. That tends to slow performance down noticeably since CPU/motherboard RAM is often slower than what may be on most videocards (DDR2 vs. GDDR3) and the overhead of bus latencies for moving info back and forth within the 'video memory'.

My guess is that CMx1 games should work on the Quadro NVS series under Vista. However fog-tables may not be present and there is the possibility of other anomalies (due more to driver support than hardware).

[GreenAsJade]

Originally posted by Schrullenhaft:

Quadros are basically marketed to business professionals for either CAD/design/animation or guaranteed performance with certain applications for business.

Yeah. Dell, at least, don't seem to have figured out that "business" people might want a "business" laptop (with the warranty, Stike-zone construction etc) but not actually for doing CAD on

The Quadro NVS 140M is a 'turbo cache' model, which means it is using a 'shared memory' scheme for some or all of its video memory. That tends to slow performance down noticeably

Wonderful, eh? Give a disadvantage a nice name like "turbo".

:mad:

Do you know if you can use the GeForce drivers with the Quadros card to get the optimisation for gaming rather than CAD use?

GaJ

[Schrullenhaft]

To my knowledge the Quadros and the GeForces use the same Unified driver. Certain "optimizations" are turned on in the driver when a Quadro is detected. I'm not sure how much of a performance hit, if any, that the Quadros have in relation to normal GeForce models when it comes to games. I think the actual difference is (typically for the desktop Quadros) is that Nvidia charges a hefty premium for the Quadros and if you were to spend an equivalent amount on a normal GeForce you could move up to a much more powerful GPU. But comparing the same GPUs, the Quadros come out a bit ahead.

I think, but I'm not sure, that the closest GPU relative to the Quadro NVS 140M is the GeForce Go 8400.

In the past (and I was a bit wrong on this in the earlier post) the Quadros did have some faster clock speeds compared to the GeForce equivalents. But a nice chunk of that performance difference was due to the optimizations present in the video driver reserved for the Quadros. The 'driver level' performance enhancement was achieved in the past with normal GeForces with some driver hacks that made normal GeForce appear as Quadros to the drivers.

The 'Turbo Cache' architecture usually involves a small amount of memory, which could be anywhere from 16MB to 256MB, that is dedicated to the videocard (standard videocard memory, though not often the fastest type). While a chunk of system memory is reserved for video use (much like most 'shared memory' video schemes). The idea is that with the PCIE bus you can shave some cost off of the video hardware by reducing the amount of physical memory that is dedicated for video. This small amount of video memory can speed the card up a bit compared to 'shared memory' schemes that have all of their memory allocated from system memory. With the Turbo Cache there is (usually) memory present with the video chip to provide a bit more performance rather than sending requests over the bus for every piece of data that is needed. Some of the higher end Quadro NVS models (300 & 500 series) for the laptop have wider memory paths and dedicated video memory compared to the 64-bit 100 series Quadro NVS's.

[ July 06, 2007, 09:36 AM: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ]

[GreenAsJade]

Thanks!

It's interesting that most "common knowledge" out there says "Oh, one is CAD the other is gaming" and leaves it at that, assuming that the Quadros is therefore worse for gaming.

I guess I'll just hafta get one and see

GaJ