While high-end workstation graphics cards may be based on roughly the same core architectures as gaming-targeted graphics cards, their purposes in life are very different. While they both accomplish the same task, processing commands and rendering images on-screen, workstation cards endure a more strenuous existence than their gaming brethren. Workstation cards are used to solve huge, mission-critical problems, like helping engineers design and build cars; helping architects to planning and construct buildings, and even help to our friendly oil and gas companies to provide more effective oil and gas production and transportation methods. For many HotHardware readers, the closest link most of you would share to the workstation graphics world, is that these high-end graphics cards are used by 3D artists, in both the game design and digital art industry. Workstation cards tend to focus on OpenGL as the API of choice, as the vast majority of modeling, CAD, and other various high-end workstation applications opt for it rather than Direct3D, the common API for gaming-level graphics on the desktop. Typically, the manufacturer performs very little modification to their base GPU (which typically sells for much less in a gaming-based card), but unlocks better performance with driver enhancements and workstation application validation alone. Professional graphics drivers really unleash what the GPUs can do with highly focused tuning in specific workload and software environments. Workstation cards also go through many stages of certifications from software tools providers to ensure compatibility, that gaming cards simply don’t have to.