Drafting/Modeling/Rendering PC: 3090 or Q6000?

[BerenElendil]

The RTX 3090 releases tomorrow, and information on the upcoming Quadro 6000 based on GA102 is just starting to filter out into the public consciousness, so I figure I should get some feedback on workloads I'll be working with, as well as some advice on my next course of action.

 

I'm building a computer that I consider a sort of "modern briefcase" that should be future-proofed fairly well, at least until I'm a few years into my first job at an architecture firm. My coursework mainly consists of work in AutoCAD, Rhino, and eventually Lumion, as well as the Adobe suite (primarily Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator). I'm fully expecting to learn some more powerful rendering and modeling tools than these in my time at university, so I want to be fairly prepared for anything I could work with there as well as at home for internships and such.

My main question is this: given this partially-theoretical workload, should I be trying tomorrow or in the near future to get my hands on a 3090, or should I shell out the extra money for a Q6000?

[SupaKomputa]

Do you need the specific quadro feature like double precission FP?

If not, a regular card can do.

[TVwazhere]

5 minutes ago, BerenElendil said:

AutoCAD, Rhino

These seem mostly dependent on the CPU (AutoCAD for sure) Autocad I know is still single core IPC dependent, not sure about Rhino

6 minutes ago, BerenElendil said:

eventually Lumion

This seems to heavily favor GPU for rendering. 

 

So a mix of CPU and GPU horsepower should be recommended here, but how soon is "eventually"? 1 year? 3+ years? If its a while out, I'd just wait on getting a very powerful card. Consider getting a "weaker" RTX3000/Quadro equivalent card first since you wont need a crap ton of GPU horsepower at first (My CAD classes in College while not specialized in a type of engineering and internshiped with firms, didnt take that much compute power to operate smoothly since the projects weren't overly huge)

[BerenElendil]

2 minutes ago, TVwazhere said:

how soon is "eventually"?

If all goes according to plan and I stay in this section of the program, I'll be starting work with Lumion in December.

[igormp]

7 minutes ago, SupaKomputa said:

Do you need the specific quadro feature like double precission FP?

If not, a regular card can do.

Only the x100 based quadros have FP64 capable HW. The ones that share the same chip of the geforce cards don't.

[EggyRepublic]

3090 and a future Q6000 should be similar, so the only benefit you'll get from a Quadro is if an application is locked to use only Quadro cards. All the apps you listed appear to support Geforce, although many professional applications still refuse to use them. 

 

I believe the main benefit of computing on Quadro is when you're building a large server and putting hundreds of GPUs together and you want something that is less likely to crash (since Quadro have ECC and dies are checked for quality), but otherwise the performance advantages Quadro used to have should be practically gone.

 

Also Quadro cards don't have good FP64 performance, for that go with a Vega VII or Tesla.

[TVwazhere]

1 minute ago, BerenElendil said:

If all goes according to plan and I stay in this section of the program, I'll be starting work with Lumion in December.

Okay so that's pretty soon. 

 

We don't know exactly how they'll perform compared to each other, but from the five minutes I've read on google, it's seems similar to how my software (Inventor) doesnt care about Geforce vs Quadro so getting an equivalent quadro is truly a waste, and I think the same is similar for Solidworks. The five minutes of google research I've done seen to also agree (some of theme were just web forums, this one is a website)

Quote

Recommended Computer Workstation For Rhino 3D

From our experience, we would recommend a professional NVIDIA Quadro graphics card with at least 4GB VRAM. NVIDIA Quadro cards are slightly more reliable than their consumer-orientated NVIDIA GeForce counterparts. We have had many Rhino customers running NVIDIA Quadro for years, and they are delighted with the results.

On the other hand, if your budget is tight, then there is no reason the NVIDIA GeForce range will not be suitable for you. Both varieties of NVIDIA graphics cards, as well as alternatives from AMD, are fully compatible with Rhino.

https://www.workstationspecialist.com/recommended-computer-workstation-for-rhino/#:~:text=There are a wide variety,suitable for use with Rhino.&text=From our experience%2C we would,consumer-orientated NVIDIA GeForce counterparts.

[BerenElendil]

Thank you for all the advice! 3090 it is for me! Wish me luck...