One of the mysteries of the modern age is the existence of two distinct lines of graphics cards by the two big manufacturers, Nvidia and ATI/AMD. There are gamer-level cards, and professional-level cards. What are their differences? Obviously, gamer-level cards are cheap, because the companies face stiff competition from each other, and want to sell as many of them as possible to make a profit. So, why are professional-level cards so much more expensive? For comparison, an “entry-level” $700 Quadro 4000 is significantly slower than a $530 high-end GeForce GTX 680, at least according to my measurements using several Vrui applications, and the closest performance-equivalent to a GeForce GTX 680 I could find was a Quadro 6000 for a whopping $3660. Granted, the Quadro 6000 has 6GB of video RAM to the GeForce’s 2GB, but that doesn’t explain the difference.

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