Or in my experience, a software vendor sells my client an "off the shelf" solution "simply" requiring configuration. Client later discovers that all the time they were "configuring", they were still writing base code! They were sold vapourware. Most of my work revolves around remediating the problems that caused (rushed development).
woah woah, look up CUDA and come back and say that again
heres some of the stuff "simple graphics cards" are doing
http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_showcase_html.html
a workstation with a few modern graphics card is outperforming supercomputers/clusters from a few years ago (all on one windows license! )
also I could not buy FB3's because when I bought my LD2000 system they did not exist yet... and while the QM is a very powerful device, its crippled by its lack of expandability (find me a PC133 stick >512MB) hence why Beyond is going to be using it as a framebuffer... just like a FB3
CUDA is just using the Graphics Card as a processor. The graphics card alone without the rest of the pc can do nothing.
The QM is a computer in its own right. If your control PC crashes then your show will still continue to play uninterupted in the QM as its able to run completely independant of the PC / laptop. Thats why its so popular with professional users because it brings rock steady reliability to a show. PC crashes, no worries. Your show continues whilst you reboot.
As for "Vapourware" Heroic, QS 2.0 is very much here. I'm going to stick my neck out and predict a full release within weeks.
maybe if you are playing a full show that got loaded into memory... in which case you would lose audio (which would ruin the show) and rebooting the computer would reboot the card... if you are running livepro and the pc or livepro crashes your output will freeze because it uses the QM as a frame buffer
also beyond is going to use the QM as a framebuffer so that argument goes out the window