Nvidia Quadro FX3000 trouble

[tehamnes]

Hi!

Anyone else having problem with this graphics card? I have tried several drivers but after some minutes in max it will crash with the notifier in viewport "failed to initialize D3D..."
For now I have switched to OpenGL which works but is also very slow.
Perhaps this is not a very good graphics card (old too) but maybe someone has experience with it and could give some tips to which driver works the best?

Currently using driver from Nvidia version 91.36 forceware (winXPsp2), 3dsmax 2008, direct3D 9.0c I think...
Have also tried driver v162.65 and v162.167 without any luck.

[GeoPal]

Did you try installing the Maxtreme drivers for 3ds max?

[tehamnes]

Thanks for your reply!
Yes, tried but failed. The maxtreme driver install says it can not install because 3dsmax 9 can not be found. Which makes sense since I use 3dsmax 2008.
Couldn't find a maxtreme driver for 3dsmax2008. Is there?

Anyway I installed the forceware driver v162.65 again and turned off the my antivirus program during install (RTFM) - think its working better now. It also might have been a conflict between programs using direct3d at the same time ,autocad2008 and max2008.

[instinct]

yes there is :

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

Kind Regards,
Thorsten

[tehamnes]

Thanx! Tried the maxtreme, but it fails at startup. I'll use openGL. This videocard doesn't seem to bee very compatible with anything other...

[andrewjohn81]

I've actually found that card to usually be faster in OGL than D3D anyway. The maxtreme drivers rely heavily on OGL. It just also impliments some D3D as well so it's more of a best of both worlds.

Overall I've found the Nvidia cards to be quite buggy, but they don't even compare to how buggy the ATI cards we had were, so I can't complain much.

Are you running two monitors? They run much better on one. I live with the bugginess. I love my two monitors, and would love more.

[MoonDoggie]

According to Bobo of FranticFilms and the updater of the maxscript help since version 6, OpenGL hasn't changed since like Max 5, here are some of his thoughts pasted from cgtalk

You should understand that displaying stuff in the viewport is just the tip of the iceberg. Most of the time Max spends calculating stuff on the CPUs, and even more often on ONE CPU only. For example, skin deformations are performed by the CPU. Particle calculations are performed on the CPU. Drawing the viewport is generally relatively fast compared to everything else Max has to do. Thus, the graphics card has a really minor role nowadays.

But when you are PANNING, ORBITING or ZOOMING around a static object (or character on a single frame), the graphics card becomes important because the geometry does not change and the CPU has nothing to do. But on OpenGL and Software Z-Buffer, Max has to send the complete scene ONCE PER UPDATE to the card, while in Direct3D, the scene can be cached in the graphics card memory (which is orders of magnitude faster to access) and redraw from there. This is why D3D is much much faster when navigating a static scene.

In addition, in Max 9, the cache got smarter and you can move a single vertex or soft selection and Max will send only the changes to the cache, not the whole mesh, so it is also orders of magnitude faster than Direct3D in Max 8 IN THAT SPECIFIC OPERATION.

Particle Flow usually takes longer to evaluate its particles than to draw them. If you don't play back the flow or are playing back from cache, it is relatively fast to redraw. Also, it is sinlge-threaded, so even having a Quad machine would use just once CPU. So you should ask which CPU would be faster for particles instead of worrying about the graphics driver.
Btw, drawing lines in Particle Flow is orders of magnitude slower than drawing points, regardless of the driver. So the display settings inside the PFlow also matter.

At the end of the day, with all improvements made to Max' D3D performance, you should really need a very good reason (or really crappy drivers) to use any of the others. SZB is not even available in Max 9 64bit (because the drivers have not been ported to 64 yet).

Hope it helps! Direct3D is much much much faster on our Quadro FX 4600 cards in the office.

[andrewjohn81]

Good to know. I've got a new machine on order. I don't know what video card it comes with but it should be either the 4600 or the next one down. I'll switch to D3D. OGL just causes way too many problems when too many apps are trying to use it at once.

[MoonDoggie]

We've been having major issues since our switch to WinXP 64-bit, Max2008, Quadro 4600 new machines, strange crashes, BSODs etc. Please let me know what your experience is with the new machine. The 4600 drivers are still fairly new so we suspect that's the problem. I don't want to sway you from the 4600 or anything, it's a great card, but it's been very frustrating for us, let me know

-Colin

[andrewjohn81]

no worries. I don't really have a choice in the matter. We were going to wait to go 64bit and everything, but then IT couldn't run their corporate scripts and all that crap so we were waiting. Instead we're just purchasing the machines that they will eventually go 64bit with. I'll report results if we ever switch to 64bit. For now we're just going to be stuck with only 4Gigs of mem in a 32bit environment.
I think the machine will actually be packed with 8Gigs of memory though. It'll be such a waste of extra power just sitting there until we get the new software.

Max 2008 sucked in 32bit though also. After I installed the 2 plugins we used and opened some things I crashed pretty much right after opening a couple scenes. That new adaptive degradation really sucks. It crashed constantly. I turned that off and didn't get as many crashes, but it didn't seem that stable. Since 2009 is coming in a couple months we'll just wait to see if that is stable to see if we should update to anything or stick with 9. 2008 really doesn't do anything for us here, so there's no point yet. The viewport didn't seem any faster at all with my video card and the adaptive degradation was crap for the kind of models we work with.

I'll keep everyone filled in with any major change though, good or bad. Of course, if it's bad it'll come off as more of a complaint. lol

[instinct]

hm. x64 and 2k8 is a breeze here on an 8800gtx. the degradation feels really smooth. I went up to 118 mio polys in the viewport without crashing. 20mio still felt workable. (And that was real world polys, not instanced teapots, but multiple fullres textured car datasets).

Regards,
Thorsten

[andrewjohn81]

That figures. Seems like Max has always done well with consumer cards, and not so well with the pro cards. I'm stuck with a Quadro card though. I could get the NVS cards, but those suck and probably still have the same problems with max.

[tehamnes]

Superb information! Strange - One should think that an expensive "pro" card should work with any software... Would love to use D3D but it crashes all the time. Maybe I've overlooked some settings in the GPU's software... Max won't even start with the maxtreme driver.

[deflix]

hmmmm!!

Yes - this sounds frustratingly familiar. I too recently bought (for the first time) a pro card. An FX4600 infact at great expense and find it unstable and crashy under Direct3d. I always used gaming cards in the past which were fast but a bit artifacty, assuming in the back of my mind that one day I would get a 'proper' card and cut through geometry like a machine.

It is unacceptable how poorly the Quadro seems to perform in MAX - with either MAXstream openGL or direct 3d. Why is this? Why are so many people being ripped off here and why does it continue top happen unchecked?

I also understand (strangely) that Quadro's are actually the SAME as GeForce cards, but just with a few minor differences and disconnections!?!

Nvidia should hang their heads in shame over this.

Long live GeForce > F**k off Quadro!!

[andrewjohn81]

If you have an app that's straight up OGL then the quadro cards make an enormous difference. They work great in maya. Max just has a strange interface.

We get them here mostly because of Rhino and ProE. I don't really use ProE unless someone gives me a file in the native format, but it makes a huge difference in Rhino since it uses OGL.

So we aren't really getting ripped off. I mean, half of what we pay for is the software/drivers I'm sure. Yes, the cards are Very similar, but I think different enough. In the past there were some hardware hacks that would allow you to make the computer think it was a quadro and use the other software. That's the part that seems a little crappy.

I just want a really good product.