There was a day when they had additional features enabled, i.e. The Quadro's tend to have more conservative clock speeds, that is the main difference. The Quadro FX 1500 has been out for how long, how long has the 7900's been out? Procurement costs are of little importance, since the workstations are a business expense, and mostly pay for themselves within a short time. Why does no-one complain? That's easy: workstations for engineers and designers make a considerable contribution to creating value in the production process. Additionally, it takes a long time before OpenGL drivers can be certified as 'stable', so the manufacturers pass these increased costs on to the customer. No OpenGL workstation user is allowed to be left alone with his problems, where it's the complete opposite for the gamer. So what justifies the enormous price difference? The majority of the costs result from customer support and driver development. As an aside, both ATi and Nvidia use the same process to position their individual products.

The drivers themselves have built-in 'artificial brakes', meaning that a gaming card can never achieve decent values in the OpenGL arena - that's reserved for workstation cards. This means that users cannot run FireGL drivers on a Radeon card, and vice versa. In order for product positioning to have the desired effect, they use an 'independent' label (FireGL instead of Radeon) and modify the card's BIOS and a bit of microcode in the chip. And that's a good thing too, because technically, the hardware for OpenGL graphics cards is no different from its gaming counterparts - the price is three time as high, though! Instead, they concentrate on the good old virtues of market maturity and stability. In contrast to graphics cards aimed at gaming, no manufacturer would even think of chucking products onto the market every four months. Clocks tick slower in the OpenGL workstation arena.

Nvidia quadro fx 1500