Has Nvidia dropped its Quadro line? Should I look instead for RTX cards? If so, do all RTX cards support whatever Solidworks, etc?
Has anyone found a decent article that can help me understand this shift?
Wow! What the hell is Nvidia doing? They’ve got not only RTX listed, there’s now Quadro RTX, as well as TXXX cards all listed as workstation cards. And they’re using the RTX designation with their gaming cards…What a mess they’ve got going on.
For some reason I couldn’t cut & paste a few minutes ago. restarted pc.
From Wikipedia:
12 Nvidia is moving away from the Quadro branding for new products, starting with the launch of the Nvidia Ampere architecture-based RTX A6000 on October 5, 2020.[2] To indicate the upgrade to the Nvidia Ampere architecture for their graphics cards technology, Nvidia RTX is the product line being produced and developed moving forward for use in professional workstations.
LINK :https://www.tomshardware.com/news/rtx-a6000-rtx-a40-to-replace-quadro-cards
Its really confusing. I’m trying to recommend a workstation to a client and I have no idea which cards play nice with SW etc…
Ugh.
I have a Quadro RTX4000 card.
2021-09-30 09_26_48.jpg
The card and driver are BOTH certified for Solidworks, but I still have some issues. (Yes, I turned “enhanced graphics” off…)
Why make it simple if you can confuse people? 
The SW Hardware Certification page is confusing too, it lists Quadro RTX 4000, 5000, etc. So do I need to look for an RTX card that has the Quadro name attached to it too, or am I ok with any RTX?
For years the ONE thing that was hammered into my head was “USE QUADRO,” and now they’re dropping the brand, so I’m a bit at sea…
This all came up today when I was looking at an article that noted that a Lenovo workstation laptop has the Nvidia RTX A5000. Is that the same as a “Quadro RTX 5000?”
Good for nVidia.
Bad for Solidworks.
They’ll never keep up with their certification.
Not that they ever did.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/design-visualization/desktop-graphics/
RTX A6000 and RTX 6000 are 2 different cards
..so unprofessional of them. 
(Bad idea)
Easy solution, buy outdated hardware.
It is a lot easier to use non-certified hardware and drivers.
Since Solidworks can’t certify fast enough.
I have two different certified cards in my two different computers. They both still have graphic issues. Maybe they would be worse if the cards weren’t certified, but having a certified card does not guarantee success.
Thanks for the replies. I’ll have to do some more research…
Can anyone point me in the direction of what the Video Card Bottom Line is for 3D CAD? Since I’m a one-man shop, I don’t need ceritification to be “safe,” I just need it to work without too much additional hassle.
Meaning, what keywords, codesets, capabilities, etc should I be looking for - since I’m not looking for Quadro any more. What precisely is it that the Quadro cards had that, say gaming cards do not have?
I’m wondering if they are heading the direction of completely eliminating “Professional” cards and just opening up everything on all the cards? Kind of like Intel unlocking their chips.
The main one I know of is that RealView does not work with gaming cards unless you do the regedit hack. In short there is no difference just that they deliver gaming cards with a bit turned off 
It’s kind of like higher end software where all you need is a code to turn on the next module. All the code is there, just not available to you until you pay them.
In the long run I think this is just a headache for Nvidia. 10 years ago people would pay 2-3X more for a professional card because they were supposedly “Better” and for Solidworks “Certified”. People quickly caught on that the professional cards were pretty much the same thing as the gaming cards and well…certification meant bumpkiss.
Covid was the final nail where the cost of gaming cards met and surpassed the cost of professional cards at similar performance levels.
So Nvidia drops professional cards and all it costs them is “Giving away” realview. For that they get to drop an entire line and make gamers compete with professionals for availability. Pretty much a win for Nvidia.
Solidworks…they’ll have to fire the one intern that is certifying the cards.
I believe they are heading that way, but I haven’t seen anything official announced.
We have used Puget Systems website for information for quite a few years now and find it to be a good/fair representation of hardware options out there. YMMV
link to their articles with Video Cards and Solidworks filters on.
https://www.pugetsystems.com/all_articles.php?filter[]=SOLIDWORKS&filter[]=Video%20Cards
This article is a bit old, but does show the transition from Quatro to RTX. Maybe too old to go into detail of the various RTXs.
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/SOLIDWORKS-2020-SP1-GPU-Performance-1682/
Most of the time when we are getting new work stations we go to third party sites like this, not SW and not PC or card manufacturer for information. When I compare those benchmark tests against cost curves there’s usually a knee in the curve where the cost increase/performance increase indicates what I call bleeding edge. I like to stay near that curve is I believe its a good compromise between overspending on hardware and keeping labor hours productive; and the cards are typically just old enough that there’s some certification or service packs to CAD or fixes in drivers.
Lastly, it certainly does suck when the non-techie’s try to make up new, trademarkable, gibberish. It seems if they laid it all out on a table with what the new jargon means customers would be able to purchase what they need. I’m convinced the goal is to confuse the customer into buying more than what they need. Maybe my problem is I’m just easily confused…
Yeah, YMMV… it was is/was a marketing 101 curve to get a manager (who does not use the hardware/software) to buy into the statistical hype.
The odds of you or anybody getting a perfect/flawless graphics card, driver matched with the software it is running on was all in your wishful cortexes.
And yes, the pass ratings on those chips for those expensive cards were set high… sure.. but, every graphics card I’ve ever worked with had issues.
Did I or any company carefully monitor time lost/gained…really?
I can say, I did not really care much if my customers high end system crashed/hung/stalled or showed problems when I worked on their projects using their hardware/software and their IT support,… because I got paid anyhow. (end of story)
I don’t think I follow all of that.
Anyway, I’m not saying we buy custom systems or that anyone else should or shouldn’t. We just use that site and some other third parties that report benchmarking.
I don’t expect any hardware/software combination to work flawlessly (no matter what the people selling it might say.) I have found that “safety in numbers” does somewhat apply here, in that the most common configurations will have the most support cases and forum threads usually leading to better chance of finding the least bad settings and practices.
As for time lost or inefficiencies, we don’t log hour by hour, but we do keep a mind about it when looking at tools that we provide for the tasks being performed. The price tag on labor is high enough that it doesn’t take perfect tracking to get an idea if the tool is a bottle neck or not. That’s all I was getting at. I’m not going to speak for all of our employees as to their attitude of whether or not they care if they are being productive. I would like to think that the overall profitability of the company from which we make our living is always in mind.
I was cutting thru the bs.
I’ve worked on enuf systems, software and projects to know the graphic card hype is/was real.
I care deeply how well my clients do overall. It’s my job and I take it seriously.
but, I can’t do anything about them buying a system which is hyped as being X times better or more stable when in fact it is not. 
That’s kind of where I’m at with Boxxx. They are significantly more expensive when compared to other similar systems with similar hardware and in my experience they offer little to no additional benefits. The additional amount they squeeze out amounts to little to nothing in the day to day usage. I also had a Boxxx laptop that was…well…not good. It seemed to have all sorts of glitches with SW that many of our Desktops just didn’t have.