nVidia does not provide support for AutoDesk products despite the fact that GTX cards have delivered performance 99.5% of their flagship Quadro cards ($4k) in 2D CAD and exceeded the Quadro cards in 3D CAD. Best part was Engineers, Architects and CAD Operators can buy the top of the line gaming card for use and even their entire home box and write it off on their taxes .... I'm told many can't do that anymore with new tax code.nVidia is just using the certification thing as a means not to have to provide support for CAD ... well if ya want support, buy or card that costs 4 to 8 times as much. Of course for rendering, animation and modeling GTX won't cut it if in production environment.As for stability, like the rest of my profession, ... been using GTX cards in our engineering office exclusively since the 1st one came out (Diamond Viper's) before that. We don't need modeling or rendering but for those that do, would ltypically have 10 or more GTX based workstations for every Quadro box. I was once asked to take a peek at a colleagues 1 year old desktop (Quadro) ..... he had said it wasn't any faster than his old machine and "he expected more", Using the cadalyst benchmark ... my 6 month old GTX based laptop was faster. However it came down to his subjective impression when staring at the screen after each operation. I asked him to just work at his normal speed w/o watching the screen. In no case over the next few minutes was he waiting for a task to complete. The machine was always ready by the time he made his next key stroke.Back in the day, late 90s I can remember paying $1,000 for a SCSI 1 GB HD because the speed made a difference. Today, any action in AutoCAD 2D and 3D is instantaneous. One of the reasons it's never been optimized for more cores is it does fine using just one (2 threads via HT) . Some tasks are offloaded to other cores such as AutoLISP interpreter but no matter what CPU is in the machine, we see no observable difference.