<p>I'm going to college this fall and am going to be buying a laptop soon. I'm not sure if I should be looking into a Quadro or FireGL card, or a Radeon or GeForce card. For chemical, electrical, biomedical, or aerospace engineering (I'm not decided yet), am I going to need to use programs that rely on graphics that would be aided by a workstation card? Is the performance gain that significant? Thanks.</p>
<p>If there are calculations that are computationally intensive, the college will probably provide workstations to complete them on.</p>
<p>I know. If I really wanted to I could probably get by with no computer at all, not even a desktop, but I'd like to keep necessary trips to the IT labs to a minimum. Doing computer work would be more convenient if I could do it in my room, or at the library, or in a closet, or the bathroom, or wherever. I was just wondering if the cards were really that different and if I'd even need to use it much.</p>
<p>I know that with some applications you can only run 1 window at a time or a simplified version with a non workstation card. I'm not sure which programs though :/</p>
<p>^ would you happen to know why that is?</p>
<p>in order to "keep necessary trips to the...labs to a minimum," wouldn't you need to buy a bunch of expensive software that you probably can't afford..?</p>
<p>The workstation graphics cards are designed in a way that makes the interactions between the card and the computer different.</p>
<p>I'll see if I can find where it was...</p>
<p>You can often use a software hack to convert a mainstream card into a workstation card. So, keep that in mind.</p>
<p>Hence, it shouldn't really matter which way you go, as long as you apply the software hack. However, if the cost difference is minimal ($100 or less), go with the workstation card directly for peace of mind.</p>
<p>My guess would be that anything that requires workstation graphics to run well will not run very well on any laptop under 17" and those are not very portable.</p>
<p>Yeah, I decided that it's not worth it to attempt to get those graphics in a laptop so I'm just going with a 14" cheaper and more portable one with less graphic power. Thanks for the help everyone.</p>