graphics card

[glorybound]

I have a salesman coming over tomorrow. He's bringing, what is called an i-PlanTable, which he is saying has a proprietary $5000 graphics card. I have read a lot of posts here, about graphics cards, and my understanding from you guys, is don't waste your money on high and graphic cards. So, can somebody give me an elevator speech on graphics cards. The more you spend, the better the card, or is it a waste of money?

Thanks

[joconnell]

3dsmax's viewport acceleration is rubbish. It doesn't make use of a lot of the features in a high end card so it's not worth paying for them. The other benefit of the high end cards is quality, in that you get less drawing errors on the screen, less viewport glitches and so on. This is important if you're working in a more critical area like cad design or any medical application where you could mistake a graphics card flaw for a problem in your model or data, but for folks who are eventually going to render the image anyway, this is less important. Save your cash at the minute until all of the 3dsmax viewport rewrites are implemented, and then see if the pro cards start to show any advantage. In the mean time spend your cash on more render nodes or an slr!

[glorybound]

This would be more for navis
works and revit