When it comes to picking up a graphics card there are two clear divides. You've got the consumer gaming graphics cards, like your GeForces and your Radeons, and then you've got the professional graphics cards targeted at workstations. Each may have very impressive specs, but ultimately professional and gaming graphics cards serve altogether different needs.
Straddling the slightly awkward ground between hardcore gaming device and even more hardcore scientific research, the GeForce GTX Titan X is a fusion of these two competing ideals. Both workstation users and gamers want more power, but they invariably want it in different areas and for vastly different uses.
Dubbed a ‘Prosumer’ graphics card, the GTX Titan X has its fingers in all the pies, offering something for both professionals and consumers - if they can stomach the mammoth price tag. Not just limited to Nvidia’s Titan X though, there’s a glut of cards such as the Quadro series and AMD’s FirePro even more laser targeted to professionals and academics.
A cursory glance at the specs of any workstation GPU can easily make them appear like the ultimate gaming device. Most won’t be tempted when they get a glimpse at the price tag, but don’t be fooled by the often eye-popping power on offer - these are designed for a totally different purpose.
When it comes to workstation graphics cards, these are primarily designed for crunching through huge quantities of data, extremely accurately, as well as rendering models in extremely high detail. Gaming graphics cards meanwhile are leaner and more streamlined, capable of lightning-quick data transfers and fast, steady frame rates.
Comparatively speaking a gaming GPU is putting out far fewer polygons than a workstation card, just at a smooth and fast rate. A polygon is a flat angular shape, which when stitched together form larger models. For example a cube would be made of six flat square polygons. For both games and rendering, they are typically what nearly everything is created using, and the more a graphics card can render every frame, the better.
When it comes to polygon rendering, gaming graphics cards are the long-distance runner to the workstation’s fine-tuned 100m sprint. As much as we want our gaming graphics cards to be perfect though, they aren’t. At least in the manner a workstation GPU is, delivering predictable and critically important performance that works every time. Workstation graphics cards are capable of applications designed to measure accuracy down to the micron-scale or up to many miles, with billions of polygons of complex geometry. Two cards may be using similar hardware but they’re achieving vastly different results.
The difference comes down to a combination of firmware and drivers. Workstation graphics cards are thoroughly tested and optimised for the applications used, such as 3D rendering and Deep Learning, and aren’t provided with gaming technical support .
Now more than ever though, the capabilities of the two types of cards are blurring. We can see this with the GTX Titans, and we can also see it by how much more accessible design tools and design-capable PCs are to the average consumer. Previously if you wanted to do video editing or have a play around with CAD you’d have to head to special studios, now you can do much of this with an off-the-shelf PC. Obviously this doesn’t cover all needs; if you’re making a Hollywood blockbuster or designing an aeroplane, you're probably best off not doing it on an HP 19.
By comparison consumer grade graphics cards are far more affordable than workstation GPUs, precisely because they’re targeted at us, the gamers. Sure there’s the extreme high-end, but the majority of gamers are happy spending $100-$200 on their graphics, upgrading as and when they need. With the Titans though we're seeing a coming together of two distinct fields, as the amount of power demanded by gamers and professionals begins to grab equal footing. There's a reason Nvidia claimed the Titan X would be capable of movie-like CGI rendering - because it will be doing exactly that in high-end studios across the globe. The only difference now is that we as gamers can begin to grab a part of the photo-realistic action.
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