You could consider Quadros as "brute force" gpus. They aren't made for high fps situations.
They are mostly used in business for CAD, Maya, 3D Studio Max, Softimage, etc..,
Now I think there is even a line of cards even higher than those, called Tesla which are used for intense calculations.
It's kind of confusing for me because I read this thread Nvidia Quadro driver 258.49 WHQL OUT - Guru3D.com Forums and apparently people have been saying that they are better than the 257.21 driver.
The architecture is similar, the concept behind the unified drivers, after that the differences appear. The Quadros/Teslas architectures expand upon the consumer/retail models. These cards retail for (Quadro) $2,000 - (Tesla) $5,000 (rough estimate).
These Quadro drivers work for the consumer models because they share a common "base" architecture, there is features in those drivers which become disabled or "dumbed down", when the driver inf detects the signature of a non Quadro.
A lot of people (like myself) upgrade to the newest drivers just because we can. I have seen improvement over the .15 drivers in the 258.21, 258.29 and 258.49 drivers, but I had to use modded inf files to install most of those.
As was said above, if you are seeing good performance in-game with the current drivers, but want to upgrade, always choose the newest WHQL drivers for your card. If it ain't broke, don't fix it as they say.
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