* Viewport 2.0 Enhancements - Now offers full-screen effects: motion blur, depth-of-field and ambient occlusion, component and manipulator displays, batch rendering capabilities and a high-performance API (application programming interface).
Key New Features in Autodesk Maya 2012 Software “The high-fidelity viewport, enhancements to Nucleus and the overall performance improvements, have made Maya 2012 more flexible, powerful and modern,” said Peter Shipkov, technical director, Digital Domain. “With Maya 2012, we have continued our long-term focus on improving production efficiency as well as real-time creative iteration with enhancements to the Maya viewport addressing new trends in previsualization, virtual moviemaking and games prototyping.” “Maya continues to drive creative innovation across the film, games and television industries - from “Black Swan” to “EA SPORTS MMA” and “NCIS, new creative standards are being set in productions of all kinds,” said Marc Petit, senior vice president, Autodesk Media & Entertainment.
The new release also includes single-step workflows to enable users to move 3D data directly between the latest versions of Maya, Autodesk MotionBuilder, Autodesk Mudbox and Autodesk Softimage Interactive Creative Environment (ICE) for better pipeline integration. announced that Autodesk Maya 2012 3D modeling, animation, visual effects, rendering and compositing software now contains powerful new toolsets for previsualization and games prototyping, extended simulation capabilities and better pipeline integration. This allows for greater precision when performing calculations and drawing images.Academy Award–Winning Technology Extends Its Toolset for Previsualization, Games Prototyping and Simulation Autodesk, Inc. Lastly, NVIDIA enables double precision floating point (FP64) capability on Quadro cards only (note: the new GeForce RTX also have this feature enabled).
In terms of drivers, Quadro cards also get special drivers that are validated for professional grade applications such as for 3D modeling, animation, etc. In addition, Quadro cards have a larger video memory frame buffer that features error correction technology. This results in better reliability, lower power consumption and lower heat output. Furthermore, Quadro cards are a little more reliable because NVIDIA chooses the higher quality graphics chips for them. For example, NVIDIA controls the specifications and quality assurance on all Quadro cards, while with GeForce cards the specifications and quality assurance are managed by the third party board partners. However the GeForce and Quadro cards are not quite the same. So why does the Quadro cost multiples more than the GeForce? The main reason is because the target customers for Quadro cards, namely large content production studios, oil and resource exploration companies and engineering firms can afford these cards which allows NVIDIA to charge a premium for the couple extra features they enable. In fact, the processors come off of the same assembly line.
In short, the actual graphics processor powering both series of cards is exactly the same. A common question we get is whether to go with a GeForce or Quadro graphics card and what the main differences are.