I have read a few articles that say blender doesn't use any of the important features that make buying a workstation card worth having. Is this true or has most of the stuff I have read been out of date? I just want to know if i buy a quadro or firepro will i actually see a different in blender, not just rendering in cycles, bigger scenes? faster view ports? does it help with things like smoke or particles. Is it worth the money or will i experience everything about the same with my gaming card.

In the PC world, 'gaming card' typically means Direct X. Blender does not use DirectX in any way, so good numbers here mean nothing.

Blender uses OpenGL for all its drawing. A fast card here means fast modeling, especially for big scenes.

In the past, Blender has used the CPU for rendering. Recently, GPU rendering has been added. Some of the speedups seem quite impressive. There are some GPU rendering benchmarks around somewhere that will give you an idea of relative performance.