Graphic card for 3ds max design 2009

[honzic]

Hi all.

I am setting up a new workstation for 3ds max. I need to decide between two graphic cards, nVidia Quadro FX1700 and ATI FireGL V5600. Which of these cards would you recommend?

THX Honzic

[Morne]

none
workstation graphics cards are useless for max. Rather save some cash and get a high end gaming graphics card.

[WimOos]

must say I do not agree : I have a quadro fx1400 from about 2,5 years ago and it is a huge amount faster than the new gtx260. It may be that the settings is just funny on the new card - I have just installed it and run it in direct x, but we have moved the machine with the gtx260 card as a render slave. Scenes which is no problem for the quadro is a pain with the gtx card.

[tammo]

Buy a nvidia 8800 and softmod to quadro 4600.
Its really fast in direct 3d and cheap.

[3LP]

could you be little more explicite on the fact of softmod the 8800.
what are the real performance gain etc.

thx )

Stan

[tammo]

You will get the performance of the quadro 4600 since it uses the same hardware as the 8800.

here is a guide how to do it, just software, no soldering required

www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=539

[beestee]

You will get more performance for the price if you go with the ATI on these high-end pro cards from what I have read.

[andrewjohn81]

If this helps your decision any someone at Autodesk told me that nearly every single one of their machines are running Quadro cards.
Kinda makes you wonder about trouble shooting any problems using a gamer card, or worse, and ATI card. Who knows what's happening with ATI right now anyway? I wouldn't be on solid drivers from them for a while.

Also, I wouldn't soft mod at work since it's kind of illegal. Maybe keep that for home, and at work just Pay for the additional drivers for the full Quadro.

[ene.xis]

Kinda makes you wonder about trouble shooting any problems using a gamer card, or worse, and ATI card. Who knows what's happening with ATI right now anyway? I wouldn't be on solid drivers from them for a while.

i am sorry, but do u speak out of your own experience? do you actually own a latest ati? or a "gamer card" for what it matters?
it stumbles me as an awfully partial opinion you got to share with others.

Also, I wouldn't soft mod at work since it's kind of illegal. Maybe keep that for home, and at work just Pay for the additional drivers for the full Quadro.

please enlighten me as how does softmoding a card is illegal?

If this helps your decision any someone at Autodesk told me that nearly every single one of their machines are running Quadro cards.

thats gotta be the worst argument ever...or the best for gamer cards


from my experience, and i have owned from "professional" quadros to nvidia and ati gamercards, and my advice is save the bucks and get yourself a nice gamercard no worries.
Ati is my choice for the moment and i must tell u i have absolute no problems whatsoever either in viewport performance nor in troubleshooting.
forget softmoding also...from my experience it ain t worth it, but its been a while since i ve done any

[andrewjohn81]

Well, I suppose you Could soft mod your video card, which really isnt illegal. The illegal part would be knowingly using the quadro drivers with that card even though it isn't a quadro card. It's pretty much exactly the same as using the Mac OS on a computer that isn't a Mac. Which is also why I said it's Kind of illegal.

I do use many computers, some have Nvidia, some ATI, and some pro cards. The reason I would recommend to steer away from ATI at the moment is because they have been bought by a company who is again splitting up, meaning their driver development may not be the greatest. I don't see where it says "matter of fact." I thought it was obvious that most of this was Based on experience and was a matter of my opinion.

I suppose the card really doesn't matter for some people. When I switch from the D3D drivers and move to the performance drivers (Maxtreme) we have noticed a Huge performance boost. If you only are dealing with really basic scenes you don't notice much. But when we are shading egineering data it makes a huge difference. In many cases it's just the difference between being able to shade, and Not being able to.

And my point about Autodesk using those cards was this: If they are all using the Quadro cards and doing their own troubleshooting on quadro cards then the likeliness of me having a problem due to graphics card conflicts is dramatically reduced if I use the same card they use. I'm not saying the cards are Better because of that in any way. Just maybe more reliable for Max.

[ene.xis]

please don t take me the wrong way Andrew!
my point was i save money on a gamer card rather then on a "professional"* one, and used elsewhere (ram) where i thought it would be more production-effective.

On the other hand i must say that the maxtreme drivers were at the time the only benefit i saw when going with quadro. It was rock solid and improve greatly the viewport performance.

As for the A-desk i was (trying) to be sarcastic.


*i really can t understand why they are called professional since they are basicly unlocked gamer cards imho, and benefit from better drivers

[andrewjohn81]

Well, simply because there are soft mods out there would show me that nearly the only difference between the cards is the drivers. Ethical on Nvidia's part? probably not, but I have seen them to greatly improve our workflow.

And yeah, i would Definitely load up the machine with other things first, but if you've got an extra couple Jackson's to spare then I'd throw in a Quadro as well.

And sorry, didn't mean to take it the wrong way. It sounded as if it were meant to be taken negatively. My mistake.

[marco]

choose FireGl V5600, best card I've ever used. (and yes, I also had several NVidia-quadro cards)

About unstable ATI-drivers: NOT true !
I now work and render on a Vista x64 system and have up-times of over a month without a single crash or display issue ! So basically only restarting the system for windows updates.
That was certainly not the case when I was using Quadro cards.

[andrewjohn81]

Again...about ATI stability issues. That's just speculation for ATI's future. Their current drivers are probably fine for most people.
But not restarting for months? You must not use as much software as some. With how much we push our machines it's recommended to restart every 3-4 days of use. There is a noticeable difference each time. But not everyone uses 6 programs at once. We are forced too due to how many groups we work with. It's just not worth closing programs and opening them all day long. Maybe if they only took a couple seconds to open.

We pulled our last ATI card out because of some issues with ProE, and some real time application. I think it was EON. That only worked with Nvidia cards at the time. I'm not just talking about Max here.

[dlparisi]

OT: Regarding speed, does anyone know of a benchmark for the viewport performance of 3dstudio max? I'm not talking about the SPEC one either but something that actually loads in 3ds and loads up a series of models and spins them around and records the time? I seem to remember something like this but can't locate it. With this type of bench you can play with the graphic card settings (opengl vs. DX, antialiasing, etc.) and rerun it.

Similarly OT, just what should the settings in the "Configure Direct 3D" dialog box to optimize performance? I see very little difference on some of them? What do some of you have this set at?

EDIT: Just DL'd the Spec 3dsmax test instead of the viewperf one and this seems to be what I was looking for...