It is difficult for you to find a professional graphics card in your hands, mainly due to the fact that they are not sold in stores. Manufacturers sell them in circuits outside of stores and usually in large volumes for key companies in the image, video editing and lately artificial intelligence sectors. Its high price is not only in terms of hardware, but also support through utilities and more personalized drivers.
How do I recognize a professional graphics card?
At first glance, a professional graphics card does not differ at all from one for gaming, many of them even use the same chips and video memories and outside of external aesthetics they have tangible differences. However, this separation is rather for historical reasons, since long before the first models that displayed 3D graphics in real time on the screen of our computers appeared, they were used in the so-called computer-aided design and manufacturing. . That is, the so-called CAD/CAM. So as home cards gained in capacity, their graphics chips or GPUs added more capabilities.
That is to say, we can use a conventional graphics card for professional use and make it stop being a component of leisure and consumption in order to become a means of production. So why do professional graphics cards exist, and what sense does it make to buy one today? Well, the first is that they can be used to play, after all they are.
Points that differences from conventional
However, they start from a series of key differences between both types of graphics card that often go unnoticed.
- Despite using the same GPU, they have a different device ID and therefore the drivers for a gaming one will not work on a professional one and vice versa. The controller is focused for use in their respective markets. Thus, one will have optimizations for games and another for applications like Blender or 3D Studio. Not to mention certain functions designed for games that will only be activated if we have a gaming graphics card and vice versa.
- The GPU of professional graphics cards usually supports virtualization, which means that instead of controlling a single list of screens, they can distribute the resources among several. This works great for cloud computing when a server has more clients than graphics cards.
- The GPU display driver is different, when gaming more importance is given to the in-game frame rate, whereas on a professional graphics card a lot of importance is given to color rendering.
- Many models use a shell configuration, which consists of putting two memory chips sharing the same bus. What allows you to do this is having twice the memory without having a bus twice as wide and not making the GPU more expensive.
- They usually have the ability to communicate with each other, a capacity that gaming ones have lost over time.
- Lastly, the quality of the motherboard components beyond the VRAM and GPU is much higher, justifying the above average price when first sold.
Are they worth it in order to play with a professional graphics card?
One might think that the fact that they are professionals makes them better to play. From here we tell you to stop thinking in that wrong way, since it is not so. The reason is that a good part of the professional cards have much poorer cooling mechanisms than in situations in which the games require it, they will reach lower clock speeds and give fewer frames per second. That is, it is paying more for less performance.
Other clues to this are the lower power PCI Express connectors they typically use. Think that they are not different chips, but the same ones, but at a lower clock speed and sometimes even with an undervolt. Related to this is also memory, which can work with less bandwidth, but also emit less heat. In any case, and as a conclusion, they are not the best option for games, especially due to the fact that what justifies the additional price, the dedicated technical support, disappears when we talk about a used component.
