Anyone gaming on Quadro?

[Och]

Ever since the pandemic started both my wife and I started working from home 80% of the time, we barely go to the office anymore. Because of that, I had to give up my upstairs game room to my wife, so she turned it into her office. She keeps a bunch of paperwork there, so she took over the whole room, the desks, etc. I also let her keep my gaming computer, which is an i7 8086K @5ghz with GTX1080. Quite an overkill for her excel spreadsheets, but it was already there.

For my purposes, I took over a smaller room downstairs to use as my office and game room. I built myself another PC, but it's a workstation PC that I mostly use with CAD software, and thus I can't use a Geforce type card. I am using an Quadro RTX 4000 card, which is basically a GTX 2070 but with drivers geared towards CAD software and not gaming. I also wanted a minimalistic approach, so I am running a 65W non overclocked i5 CPU, to keep temps and noise down.

It mostly does the job, I was even able to beat Doom Eternal and Rage 2 with the framerate locked at 60FPS most of the time running at 4k. However in some games, even older games, the framerate is all over the place. For instance Mafia 3 was unplayable 30-40fps, just started to play Black Mesa, and right during into the framerate dropped to 30 in open areas. I wonder if anyone else has any experience gaming on Quadro, are these drops in FPS due to poorly optimized drivers or is it my CPU?

 

[Och]

I was also thinking about getting the latest i9 CPU, but from what I hear they consume well over 200W, I really don't want all that heat.

 

[Trunks0]

Well after seeing the driver overhead problem on GeForce cards, I would wonder if that extends to Quadro's. So a CPU upgrade may help. Mafia 3 runs pretty poorly on my little i5 and after looking at benchmarks, it appears the engine likes having more CPU power than I got.

If you google it, it's apparently a simple INI file edit to make the game-ready GeForce drivers work on a Quadro. That said, you could just try the Studio-Driver. It's Quadro compatible and its the same as the game-ready driver with some extra validation for studio/pro work (Like ProViz). So it just barely trails the game-ready driver usually.

*edit* Also the latest i9's are a giant waste of time. Possibly the most disappointing Intel product in ages. At least according to just about every review out there.

 

[SirBaron]

I was also thinking about getting the latest i9 CPU, but from what I hear they consume well over 200W, I really don't want all that heat.

My 5800X also produces a lot of heat, especially in low CPU usuage as well. I really don't like the way that a tiny use of CPU pushes it up to like 50'c.

 

[acroig]

I was also thinking about getting the latest i9 CPU, but from what I hear they consume well over 200W, I really don't want all that heat.

If you have a microcenter near you a 10900KF can be yours for $349 or less.

 

[Destroy]

Its a bad time to try and upgrade; price, heat and availability all suck on the newest stuff.

Wait for next gen products or continue to use older products is the smart and penny wise way to go.

 

[Och]

Its a bad time to try and upgrade; price, heat and availability all suck on the newest stuff.

Wait for next gen products or continue to use older products is the smart and penny wise way to go.

I am probably just going to wait it out until new generation of Quadro cards are readily available (they are now called A instead of Quadro), and wait for next gen CPUs from Intel and AMDs. It isn't a good time to upgrade.

I'll give studio drivers a try. As long as it doesn't affect the performance of CAD software, many CAD programs disable certain features if they don't detect a workstation card. Quite a scam, but it is what it is.

 

[Trunks0]

You can find some decent deals on generation or two older Intel hardware. I've seen the 9900K and 9700K's going for some awfully temping pricing here in Canada. And those CPU's still completely rock.

 

[Fuku2]

You can find some decent deals on generation or two older Intel hardware. I've seen the 9900K and 9700K's going for some awfully temping pricing here in Canada. And those CPU's still completely rock.

 

[Trunks0]

it's sort of a blessing we all hated at the time. Because Intel made so little gains, allot of the older stuff going back quiet a few generations is perfectly capable by today's standards. Making for a nice used market and allowing retailers to offer some decent discounts

 

[Och]

You can find some decent deals on generation or two older Intel hardware. I've seen the 9900K and 9700K's going for some awfully temping pricing here in Canada. And those CPU's still completely rock.

Its not the price that an issue for me, but the lack of interesting products. For instance, my old 8086k that is now my wifes, I bought it from silicon lottery, and they delided it and tested it stable at 5.2 or 5.3 on all cores. It is a six core chip. Then I built a pc for my daughter in 2019, using an 8 core 9700k which was tested at 5.1 on all cores by silicon lottery, but I had it scale it to 4.8 because she was getting occasional freezes. Newer CPUs with 10-12 cores do not appeal to me at all, they provide little to no benefit outside of video editing, overclock poorly, consume a ton of energy and produce a ton of heat. I think 6, or even 4 cores is the sweet spot.