What’s the Difference Between GeForce and Quadro Graphics

Cards?
When you’re at your computer, no matter what you’re doing, you want the visual
experience to be as good as possible. When you’re settling in for a marathon
Fortnite campaign, you want to feel like you’re airdropping out of a real flying bus.
When you’re rendering an image of your latest CAD assembly, you want to feel
like you’re looking at a bona fide photograph of your product. In both cases, you
want the graphics to run as smoothly and quickly as possible.

These expectations all fall to your computer’s graphical processing unit, or GPU.
The GPU is the heart of the graphics cards that sit modestly in your computer
chassis, endlessly performing graphical calculations and sending the results to your
dual 4K monitors. Take a moment to appreciate them, because without graphics
cards we’d all be stuck playing Bandersnatch on our MS-DOS workstations.

OK, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but graphics cards are an absolutely
critical component of modern computer systems. If you’ve ever built your own PC
or customized your own workstation, you know that the choice of graphics card is
one of the biggest steps of the whole process. In terms of importance, the GPU is
right up there with the central processing unit (CPU)—you know, that chip that
makes the whole computer work. The right graphics card can make your system
run like a dream. The wrong one can make your system self-destruct (because
you’ll likely want to rip it out of the chassis and smash it to bits).

In this article, we’ll take a look at two of the most prominent graphics cards
products on the market: the NVIDIA GeForce lineup and the NVIDIA Quadro
lineup. Each of these product families has been around for two decades, and while
there are many similarities between them, there’s one big difference: the target
user. GeForce graphics cards are meant for gamers and other consumer users,
while Quadro cards are meant for professionals: engineers, designers, 3D
animators, and anyone who’s job depends on computer graphics. Let’s find out
why.
The first thing to understand about them is that all NVIDIA graphics cards are built
on the same underlying GPU architecture. The architecture describes the types and
arrangements of the components needed for graphical processing. NVIDIA updates
its GPU architecture often, and the latest architecture is named Turing (other
architectures have been named Volta, Pascal, Maxwell, Kepler, Fermi and Tesla).
Turing underlies the latest GeForce and Quadro cards, the GeForce RTX series and
Quadro RTX series. The RTX stands for real-time ray tracing, and we’ll cover it in
more detail in another article.

So, if the underlying GPUs are the same in the cards, then all Quadro and GeForce
cards must be the same, right?

Wrong. To start, there are actually three versions of the Turing architecture:
TU102, TU104 and TU106. Each version includes different quantities of the
components used for graphical processing. TU102 has the most of everything,
TU104 has a little less, and TU106 has less still. In this way, a graphics card built
on TU102 will be more powerful than one built on TU106. In addition, a given
GPU can be configured to utilize all or part of its total capacity. So even two
graphics cards that are built on the TU102 architecture can differ in their
performance capabilities.

We won’t cover the details of the Turing architecture in this article, but a quick
glance at the three chip diagrams clearly reveals the difference. Just look at the
relative area of the green and yellow blocks in each chip. The more green and
yellow you see, the more computing power the chip has. While both the highest-
end GeForce and Quadro GPUs are built on the TU102 architecture, the lowest-end
GeForce cards are built on TU106, but the lowest-end Quadro cards are built on
the more powerful TU104.

The variation in processing ability accounts for one big differentiator between
GeForce and Quadro graphics cards. In general, GeForce cards have less
computing power than Quadro cards. The architecture in the two cards is exactly
the same, but the quantity of processing components is different. Quadro cards
simply have more computational muscle than GeForce cards.