nvidia显卡系列：geforce/quadro/tesla

zz: http://www.heatonresearch.com/node/2487 

nVidia GPU Families

Okay, at this point, I've decided on the chipset manufacturer that I will use. That is nVidia. Now, which nVidia card to choose. I am not a gamer. So I really do not keep up with the latest offerings by the various video card manufacturers. So I was immediately overwhelmed by the video card families offered by nVidia. Which should I buy? If you factor out notebook computers, you are left with three different families of cards you can buy for a desktop.

• GeForce
• Quadro
• Tesla

I had a difficult time telling the difference between these. And after many hours of pouring over forum posts, reviews, nVidia's own material and other sources, I made my decision. Let me review what each of these are.

GeForce is perhaps the most well know of the nVidia lines. GeForce cards are designed for gamers. The absolutely pack the greatest amount of raw processing power for the amount of money you spend. GeForce is considerably cheaper than Quadro and Tesla. If you are a gamer, this is a no-brainer. Get a GeForce. Quadro cards are tested and certified to work with these packages. The difference is primarily in the drivers.

Quadro cards are the "professional" family of nVidia cards. They are designed for CAD/graphics systems. I saw a common theme on many sites. If you create content, then buy a Quadro. If you consume content, then buy a GeForce. Many high-end CAD and graphics creation software packages make use of CUDA and other advanced features of GPU's. The physical hardware is fairly similar between Quadro and GeForce. Quadro is great if you are a system builder creating machines for a particular program. You can be guaranteed it will work. Most likely GeForce would work too, but who wants guess work when you are selling a client several machines costing big bucks.

Tesla represents the high-end of the nVidia line. Yet again, just like with Quadro vs GeForce the difference gets fuzzy. Again, the difference is mainly in the drivers. GeForce and Quadro are meant for single person computers, or workstations. Tesla is for the data center. For servers. The hardware in a Tesla is not that different than a GeForce or Quadro. One really nice feature of Tesla, at least on windows, is that it can be run from a service. Out of the box, Quadro and GeForce cannot be run as a windows service. The program must be run from the GUI by the user. For most single user apps, this if fine. However, if I were building a cluster of 200 machines, I would really want to run my program as a service on each of them.