3ds max 2010 design - quadro 1800 - nvidia performance drivers

[KAKTUSDIGITAL]

Has anyone managed to install the nvidia performance drivers for 2010 design? I find the installer complains that 3ds max is not installed.
I'm running windows 7 x64.

cheers,
Henry

[Bruce Hart]

Hi,
I have the same card and had the same problem. I looked inside the Nvidia install setup config files on the drivers and saw it was looking for 2009.

A guy on CGArchitect recommended you just get the 3dsmaxpd.drv out of the installer folder it makes and copy it into your max driver folder. When you start Max it will come up with a dialoge box to install. I then had to shut down Max while this was up, so it would actually run, as it complained it could not go ahead while Max was going. After all this it installed finally.

Hope this helps

[KAKTUSDIGITAL]

thanks for that, it works now!

and now for problem No.2

I'm rocking a 800,000 poly scene, and getting 2fps , that surely aint right!
How is the performance of the 1800 in your opinion?

[Bruce Hart]

Hey again,
I only got this card late last year on my work computer. At first the drivers I had for it caused Photoshop CS4 to crash. Updated drivers fixed this, but then caused MAX to crash using Direct X. Stuff like this is VERY frustrating when you have deadlines. The performance drivers were just another problem. I have not worked on any really heavy scenes yet in the order of 800k poly, so I can't say what we should be expecting. I'll do some tests when I have some time.

In general it does not seem to be a card to write home about in light of the problems I've had. MAX performance does not seem to be any better than my old 8800 GTX card I have at home - in some ways worse. Perhaps when the whole CUDA thing gets going I'll see a difference in various apps. Maybe when there's a GPU, Vray RT version I'll appreciate it more. I'd be interested to see how other people have found it too.

Cheers

[KAKTUSDIGITAL]

Thanks for your experiences Bruce.
I've kind of nutted down half the issue, I think it may be an issue with an imported Revit model. Even isolating a single object (10polys or so) I only get 29-30 fps. Where as if I start a completely new scene and make a box with a few sides, it gets roughly 400fps.

Cheers,
Henry

[Bruce Hart]

Ah well - don't get me started on Revit - this is probably more to do with your problems rather than the Video card perhaps. As you may have seen, the standard import process usually results in a named object for every component. Max hates a lot of objects in a scene, and can slow things down to a crawl. It also results in large file sizes.

These days I import a revit model, export it out again as an OBJ and then import it back in. You just have to watch that some of the geometry here and there does not get screwed up, but in general it works well. This process consolidates all the bits into single objects and gets rid of those invisible block headers.

good luck with it...

[KAKTUSDIGITAL]

Thanks for the tips Bruce, they worked really well and got me 5X faster frame rates.

I'm just wondering if i'm doing something wrong here, I export out the obj from max, then re-import - but I somehow loose all my material assignments.

Have you had any luck (in terms of material assignments) with other formats? dxf.. etc..

[Bruce Hart]

Hi Kaktus,
sorry I forgot to mention about materials. I do this process right after I get a Revit model from drafters in the office, so I'm not really concerned with keeping any Revit mapping or materials it may have. Revit uses MR Pro Materials. In Max I used to change them to A&D shaders anyway if using Mental, or more recently Vray Mats. I would just reapply my own UVW mapping. Once the model is back in you may find it's pretty easy to select by object and reassign colours.

Even if you tried say 3DS, it would not support Box mapping or long filenames to my knowledge. Anyway - I found reappying materials alot less painfull than dealing with gazillion Revit objects (which is the real performance killer I think). There are some limited UVW mapping options in the OBJ export/import, but I have not been able to get them to work.

Cheers

[KAKTUSDIGITAL]

Yeah I think your right on the whole materials issue, I'll just resort to doing it manually.

I think the problems with my material assignments was that the Pro materials wasnt supported by the OBJ, so they just assigned the single material to the whole model.

Anyway,
Thanks alot for all your insights, its been a tremendous help!

Cheers,
Henry