NVS 510 for high res, non-gaming, mulit-head use.

[vlc]

Comparing the NVS-510 to any other card on the benchmarks shows it is basically good for NOTHING. Yet the price is quite high and those who own it, seem to like it. I'm looking for a multi-head, high res that will run 2D trading charts at high speed without choking the CPU of the PC.
Since the NVS 510 is not an old card and is still being sold, how come the benchmarks don't show what it is good at?
e.g. what is it better at than say a GTX - 970 ?

[Tim (PassMark)]

The video card benchmark score shown on the website is the 3D score, which what most people are interested in (though the 2D score is also displayed in a tooltip when hovering over it in the list).

The NVS 510 is quite a specialised card and is designed to run multiple displays at very low power consumption (35W) so it likely won't perform very well on 3D benchmarks.

To see the individual differences between cards on the various tests that make up the 3D (or 2D) score you can install PerformanceTest and download baselines containing those specific cards to compare.

Using the GTX 970 as an example comparison (which is a card designed for gaming and uses 135W) you can see that yes it scores vastly higher than the NVS 510 in the 3D tests, however the 2D results are a lot closer (though the 970 still scores higher).

[vlc]

Thanks very much for the explanation. From what you're saying, apart from the power advantage on the 510, the 970 is probably better for me. Thanks again.

[David (PassMark)]

If you aren't doing gaming or 3D work or DirectCompute work, then I think the 970 is overkill. You'll never use most of the functionality.

Even some of the integrated GPUs do multiple monitors.

Intel's Skylake CPUs can support up to 3 monitors and also 4K resolution. (I'm not sure if they do 3 monitors at 4K at the same time however).