What's the difference between Quadro and GeForce drivers

[MonsterMaxx]

Re: HP 8510w lappy, Santa Rosa w/ a Quadro FX 570M

It's been a long saga this notebook upgrade. Without going into all the details a T61P ended in a dispute with Lenovo and has wasted 5 months of my time. I even bought a Vaio at one point when Lenovo was jerking me around and I didn't think I'd ever get the T, but it didn't have the graphics muscle I needed.

All's well with the HP though. Got it yesterday and am quite pleased. Have it dual booting off a clean drive into XP and Vista64. 3dMark05 of 8309 and that's with the vid driver M$ offered in M$ update. I expect more with some tweaking and driver selection.

Sweet little machine. Way better quality than the Lenovo.

Anyway, over the months I've tried a lot of different drivers with varying results from this site (big thanks.)

Anyway, I went to download the latest from nVidia for the Quadro and they offered 162.5 as the Quadro driver. 162.50_quadro_winxp2k_english_whql.exe

Obviously it didn't install anyway, but it leaves me wondering what is the difference between these two families of driver.

Perhaps I'm mistaken, but aren't the drivers here GeForce drivers? Are there Quadro drivers too (modified inf?) or are they the same thing?

Any info on this would be appriciated. Thanks in advance.

Edited September 22, 2007 by MonsterMaxx

[MonsterMaxx]

Is this a stupid question or is there no one that knows the answer?

[®®®]

It's all the same as it's unified (NVIDIA UDA driver). Quadro drivers though are specialized and come with 3D-application profiles (wsapps.xml and *.TVM files)... additionally to the game profile XML.

So no, there's no special or extra modded INF for quadros. Each driver gets a modded INF based on the original INF and it supports all cards. Pieter also adds Quadro Tweaks in his INF.

Plain simple, i hope :)

[whitetigerx7]

It's the same driver really but it reacts to the GeForce and Quadro chips differently.

Quadros are more for DCC and CAD applications and usage.

GeForces are more for video, multimedia, and gaming.

It may look and behave like the same chip but Quadros are not built for gaming, video playback, or gaming in any way.