If your processing on the GPU then the more cores and RAM availalbe would be the key, so £ per power would go to the Gforce, same as rendering in Maya, just on a different platform.

Quadros are the same (or used to be) as Gforces but with different firmware, you used to be able to soft mod a gforce to a quado, I thnk they are more "top end" now as in that the hardware will fall down into Gforces.

Quadros are more "3D package" ready for open GL for viewport performance etc in the firmware, not in their actual make up, or, at least they used to be.

As for processing I know of a place where they replaced a small cluster with a Tesla and got a far superior performance with genetrc algorithms in matlab.