Quadro FX3400 vs 8800GT?

[duke2]

One of the bosses brought back this Quadro from when he was in Dubai for a while. Does anyone know if these give any advantage in Max vs my current 8800GT? I couldn't find any benchmarks..

[dbuchhofer]

from my experience the 8800 series is somewhat equivalent to the 1700 series quadros.. and my 1700 was a ton faster than my 3500.. soooo in a roundabout way to not really answer the question, probably not

quadros: first number = clock/speed within that generation, second number = generation, generation makes a muuuch larger difference then the speed

[uplink]

One of the bosses brought back this Quadro from when he was in Dubai for a while. Does anyone know if these give any advantage in Max vs my current 8800GT? I couldn't find any benchmarks..

well in general, You can use it only to accelerate the viewport, in fact I never found out how to use computing power of VGA in 3D Studio Max. Even when I have Quadro Card with profesional abilities it's just good for viewport. Am I missing something? Because the rough computing power of GPU is quiet solid...is there any way how to use it for rendering directly? Sorry for a little OT...

[dbuchhofer]

in short, no not yet.. there have been strides taken in using gpu's for general purpose computing, but you probably wont see much of it for a while yet.

[instinct]

I assume this was meant as a Max/Viewport question as it is in offtopic and doesnt say VRay anywhere ?

Stil i am with Dave there...go 8800 for max in DX mode with cached dx meshes enabled.

Regards,
Thorsten

[duke2]

Yeah i'm under the impression Quadro's are becoming less and less advantageous. The odd program that still uses OpenGL out there may benefit, but in general Autodesk has moved towards DirectX - even with programs like Autocad and Revit (both of which use DX in their 2010 releases).

[instinct]

"The odd program" ? that's kinda harsh. And to be honest i hate the move towards directX as it is tying you to the windows world and is defined by MS. opengl is an open crossplattform standard and i'd prefer it to be honest :/

[Morne]

OpenGL

If I'm not mistaken I seem to recall that Houdini still very successfully uses OpenGL exclusively. (they don't use DirectX) Anybody care to confirm?

Also I prefer OpenGL. Gave me many more miles in the past than DirectX. On my 4 year old laptop max 2010 works better with OpenGL (directx doesn't show textures in the viewport for some reason) Hey the laptop is single core with 1GB Ram. Comes in handy sometimes.

[instinct]

Yes it does. So does Maya (so far :P )

[duke2]

"The odd program" ? that's kinda harsh. And to be honest i hate the move towards directX as it is tying you to the windows world and is defined by MS. opengl is an open crossplattform standard and i'd prefer it to be honest :/

I prefer it too but it doesn't affect the reality of the situation! OpenGL is great, and pushes polys better than DX, but Autodesk, for whatever reason, is heading towards DX across the board. Maybe it's easier to manager - I dunno. And by "odd program", I didn't mean the programs themselves were strange, I meant "the occasional program" (ie. not many left).

[instinct]

hm. i might be off there but my impression would be that Max is the exception there rather then the others. Maya, XSI, Houdini, C4D and well just about every app that is not windows only. Hence i find it a tad sad that Max is standing aside :/

Regards,
Thorsten