FireGL is an ATI brand, rather than a specific technology. So different FireGL cards have different performance characteristics relative to their Radeon counterparts. I recent years the core GPU has been the samethe consumer-level and professional cards. The difference has been the OpenGL driver, which was optimized for Quake games for the consumer card, and for CAD in the FireGL cards. The CAD OpenGL drivers tend to handle lines better and to have more accurate mesh rasterization, so you get fewer cracks and pin holes in meshes. There are some web sites out there that show the same car door panel rendered with different cards and drivers. No card and driver combo is perfect Maya used to use obscure features of OpenGL (the menu planes) which were not implemented in game level OpenGL drivers, but were implemented in CAD OpenGL drivers. But Maya has long since stopped using those features. I know NVIDIA used to disable aa lines in their consumer GPUs. posted by JoeWebSurferOctober 13, 2004 at 13:50 [ e ]

For reference, the chip on an NVidia Quadro is exactly the same as the one on a gming NVidia card. One of their hardware guys admitted to me that the game drivers are crippled on purpose to render flat-shaded polys and line slower than the 'pro' drivers. This doesn't affect people playing games but it forces Maya/Max users to buy the high-end pro cards. posted by DidsOctober 13, 2004 at 16:45 [ e ]

what Dids said On OS X the nvidia cards like the nv20 had all the corresponding quadro features, except maybe custom clipping planes or something. not sure about nowadays, but any difference is indeed most likely due to marketecture, not architecture. posted by anonymousTroyOctober 14, 2004 at 4:00 [ e ]