Workstation graphics cards

[tricky]

Dual ATI FireGL7200 cards or something from Nvidia?

[joconnell]

For max use an nvidia card and use direct x - a good games card will be very bloody good. Open GL hasn't developed as quick as direct X and max always had poor ogl acceleration anyway - it really doesn't take advantage of the higher end cards well enough. A quadro with maxtreme will be a bit quicker under open GL than a geforce card but it'll end up costing four or five times as much - I'd really recommend getting a games card and putting the left over money into another render node or a faster cpu for your system.

Also note that an old system will choke a newer graphics card.

[dbuchhofer]

i'm much enjoying the 8800 here, and weighing in at ~$500-650 its hard to beat.

the newer max9 maxtreme drivers are an actual improvement over the normal directx imho for the first time in several versions of max. but to get a reasonably similar performance to the 8800 you're looking in the $1500+ range for a quadro.

I chose the game card, was worried at first, but its been working like a champ, and its *considerably* faster than my quadro 3000 was. not to mention cheaper. still. 3 years later.

[flavrsaver]

I have an nvidia Quadro 4500 and I love it. I'm still on Max 8 though and I've found that Max crashes a lot when I used Direct3D, so I've had to use OpenGL to keep things stable. I need to upgrade to Max 9 and see if that helps. Overall, I love the card.

[aphex79]

im upgrading too, should i keep the fx-1300, or buy a new game card?

[Morbid Angel]

yeah I love the 8800, make sure to get GTX not GTS, and honestly, what the big deal about quadros anyway? imo they are overpriced and overrated, and working on a few of them I see no superb performance what so ever.

[MegaPixel]

I'm never going Quadro again. I've spent thousands on these so called "better for workstations" cards and had nothing but viewport video glitches and average preformance while I watch all my buddies with regular geforces do the same stuff just as well and can still play the latest games on their systems with all the effects. I guess Quadros had a nitch for OpenGL, but the newer releases of MAX and other app.s are pushing for Direct X anyhow so... How can they justify the extra zeros on the price of Quadros over the gaming grade cards?

[Clifton Santiago]

I have a quadro 4500 (512 mb) on one machine and Geforce 7900 GTX (512 Mb) on another. I have found the Quadro card is probably twice as fast as the Geforce, if not more. I was recently working on a high-poly model on my Quadro with no delay while zooming, panning, etc., and then when working on the Geforce machine, there was severe lag when doing the same.

Also, the Geforce is causing blue screen crashes about once a day if one has too many windows open.

[Morbid Angel]

Clifton if im not mistaken, quadro 4500 is one of the newer cards out there. And, lets compare the prices, quadro from 1,700 - 3,600
whereas geforce 7900 is below 500. If you compare between quadro 4500 and geforce 8800 gtx you will see that its a lot faster, though its still money wise quite lower then any quadro...
thats the biggest thing here...imo

[gilicom]

clifton are you using direct 3d for the gforce?

[DaForce]

Clifton, if you are getting blue screens..etc.. with too many windows open I would say there is a problem with either the drivers or the card which may well be affecting the performance of it too.

[Clifton Santiago]

Yeah, no kidding. I haven't read the known issues of nvidia geforce drivers lately, but 6 months ago, one of the known issues was that the drivers for the 7900 series were completely broken with XP 64 and dual dual-core machines. Essentially the drivers could not properly recognize the processors and would get confused and give blue screens every 10 or 15 minutes. The workaround was to revert back to the earliest stable driver which only recognized single cores. However, Nvidia only offered such a driver for the 7800 or before. What I found was an early XFX driver that worked the same way. I recently installed XFX's latest drivers for their 7900 which make it a bit faster, but my Quadro card still kicks its ass.

[DaForce]

With the latest xfx drivers does it still blue screen?

[Clifton Santiago]

Only about once a day. Which is much more stable than it is with the latest Nvidia drivers. Oh, and I have dual view enabled which causes problems. It doesn't crash in single monitor mode. Which sucks for me, but the Geforce machine is normally for my junior visualizer and she only has one monitor.

[DaForce]

Weird.

Mind you.. my 8800GTX was having the odd Blue screen but thats entirely due to shit drivers ATM