nvidia quadro fx 3500

[mikeh]

aaaaaaaaargh! This card on a 64 bit system w/max 2008 has got to be the slowest piece of crap i have ever had the dipleasure to work with. I wait constantly after every move i make in wire frame mode...and i have optimized the objects to mostly dispaly as bounding boxes. And this card is soooo expensive! It sucks in both OGL mode and direct x 9 mode. (OGL being the better of the two)
And i have never had a card that literally brings the entire computer to its knees before. if the card fails then you are out of luck...you have to reboot the machine by turning the "off" button on the machine off.

just a vent.

sorry to take up space here.
mh

[instinct]

Did you try the maxtreme drivers instead of ogl or dx ? Just a shot in the dark

Regards,
Thorsten

[mikeh]

the card has its own max settings...now, unless i'm unaware of it, there are no "maxtreme" drivers beyond what is with the software for the card.

To make matters worse, i can't open up some older files that were done on my older "less powerful" 32 bit computer because the worthless "new and improved " card can't handle the display that the older less powerful card had no problem with. i have to merge them into a new file, piece by piece and optimize the display as i merge them in.

It is very disappointing.
mh

[instinct]

i dunno if maxtreme comes with the card. But nvidia releases custom 3d max gfx drivers.

See http://www.nvidia.com/object/maxtreme_10.00.00.html

Regards,
Thorsten

[mikeh]

thanks for the tip and link. i downloaded the lastest maxtreme driver and ...it is faster...but quirky...things don't display at all some times unless you pan and then they disappear after panning, selected items don't display as selected...so i guess it's a tossup, fast over accurate. I'll try fast for awhile.
mh

[mikeh]

of course, among the quirks is that every time you try to grab something to move it, the object jumps far away from the "move" icon and stays there so you have to "adjust" your move to carry this thing that is far from where you are actually carrying it.
mh

[mikeh]

and when you put on "safe frame" everything disappears in all views until you take it off.
(Just more wonderful discoveries)
mh

[Joost Ink]

I recently got a new pc with the same card.
winx64 and max8.
but for me it rocks! I was surpriced with the speed.
I use the maxtreme driver.

there is also a thing on the nvidia site called nTune.
With this you can do a sort of performance test.
takes 20 min. It optimizes your card with your system somehow and it did work for me.

You might try that.

[mikeh]

thanks for the tip....but it did nothing...when i go to grab something to move it, it still jumps away from the cursor and remains locked there and safe frame is still broken. Select safe frame mode and everything disappears. The ntune software seems to be what i had before i went to maxtreme. maybe its the fact that this @#$ card is trying to drive a 24" monitor...i don't know...what i do know is that for the money, it sucks.
mh

[PixelJockey]

I have found that scatter compound objects in Max 2008 have a huge negative impact on viewport performance. Just having 10% visible objects makes the viewport virtually unresponsive. I talked to an Autodesk guy about the issue and he thought the code for the scatter objects was "pretty old" and suggested that someone needs to rewrite it... and that someone would be???.... Autodesk? Hellooooo? One step forward, two steps back.

Do you have any scatter objects?

[mikeh]

none.....i switched back to the OGL driver and switched over to the modeling presets for the driver. Seems to be better somewhat.
mh

[jonahhawk]

I'm sorry you're having such troubles with your display. I can't stand viewport problems. Drives me nuts.

Which card did you have before that worked so well?

We have six, soon to be seven, stations with 3500s in them and we have little trouble. We each have a 30" and 20" monitors each at full resolution; 2560x1600 and 1200x1600.

A couple more tips: DX works best in shaded mode and OGL in wireframe. (for us, the Maxtreme drivers have been the best). I know it's not as fun but on large scenes we turn on adaptive degradation and set it to bounding box only. Flipping through the other modes takes too long to regen. I personally use a lot of layers, hide what I don't need as much as possible. For the safe frame, there is an option in preferences to "Mask outside the Safeframe" With this on, in large scenes, Max would redraw the scene two or three times. with it off, it redraws once. Much faster.

On a side note, when our cards have gone bad, (we had some memory going bad slowly on a couple machines) Boxx sent a new one before we had even returned the original. very prompt service. little or no down time.

hope it works out for you

jonah

[mikeh]

i wonder why the maxtreme driver, for me, is so error ridden? I have uninstalled it and reinstalled it and still i get the same problems, in top view, nothing is visible, in safe frame, nothing is visible, try to grab something and it jumps very far from the cursor and stays there making it impossible to accurately move things.

If you have to set everything to bounding box display then you are just working around a weak card...it shouldn't be that way...that is not what i would say is "having no problems" with this card. i would say you are just accommodating a bad card with bad drivers.

The other computers that had max on them are gone and i can't recall what one of the the cards was, one had a quadro fx 500, but that was under xp in a 32 bit environment...all i know is that i can't open some old files because this new card can't handle them. that is not an improvement.
mh

[jonahhawk]

I suppose it depends on the scene doesn't it? A lot of our scenes have 3-5 million polygons and as many as 4000 proxies on top of that. I think we accommodate our scene more than the card/drivers. I don't have any of the problems you mention, even with safe frames on and in the top viewport

If you have objects that are far from the origin, you can have all kinds of accuracy issues. Could this be part of your problem?

[mikeh]

no, i learned a long time agao about moving everything to origin. my guess is that there is some conflict somewhere with something (real specific, huh) that is interferring with the maxtreme driver. Since i spent some time adjusting the settings in the nvidia master settings and dumping the "visualization" pre-sets and going with the "modeling" pre-sets for max, things are better.

If we had my machine next to one of yours maybe i could find the difference and correct whatever it is. maybe my Vista is different, maybe...who knows. It's why i look forward to the day i stop doing 3d and maybe even stop using computers beyond simple emails. I completely understand why the very famous JKJ of former max forum fame disappeared from sight when he retired. You just get tired of the frustration that will always be software and computers.
mh