Graphics Crash

[glorybound]

I am not sure what is causing this, but I thought this would be the place I can get help. When spinning around my MAX model, my machine freezes and I get bright flashing pixels everywhere. I have the latest graphics driver. Has anyone experienced this? Nothing new was installed.

[Donald2B]

Uh oh! That usually means your video card is about to go belly up.

Anytime you start getting strange artifacting on your screen it's usually not a good sign. Typically hardware related.

[glorybound]

It seems to only happen in MAX, and all of a sudden. I am rolling back my video drivers now. It seems that I was running a beta, so I rolled back to the latest stable. It was working, but all of a sudden, animated rainbows! Now, I am going back several months. It freezes my entire machine, so I have to hard reboot. I have a NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700

[Donald2B]

It's probably only happening in Max because Max is using the 3D Hardware acceleration of your card...It may be upgrade time. I'm running the latest beta driver on my Quadro K5000 with no issues.

[glorybound]

Is that a good card? What would you recommend?

It's probably only happening in Max because Max is using the 3D Hardware acceleration of your card...It may be upgrade time. I'm running the latest beta driver on my Quadro K5000 with no issues.

[Neilg]

If you spend most of your time in shaded video then get a geforce for 1/4 the price.

[Donald2B]

Cubicle is correct. For simple arch viz stuff, I think a top end GTX or Titan card would be a great card.

GTX cards are absolutely worthless in our pipeline. We do lots of engineering/product visualization along with arch vis stuff and the GTX cards are just too slow in the viewports. Our modelers are using Quadro K4000 cards and our leads are using Quadro K5000 cards. Best money spent in our workstations. Body objects are a bitch to work with in Max period! I wish they would get that figured out, and soon!

[glorybound]

what about this?

http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desk...specifications

[glorybound]

or, is this better?

http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro-...l#pdpContent=2

[glorybound]

I ended up ordering this one.

or, is this better?

http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro-...l#pdpContent=2

[Donald2B]

Sorry for delay, gotta pay the bills.

If you aren't working with too many scenes with over 50 million polys, I would have tried out the Titan. It's almost half the cost of the Quadro K5000. If it didn't work out, I would look into the return policy.

Most of my scenes are HUGE! I use placeholders as much as I can, but towards the end, it takes too much time to swap between the different assets for rendering. Not to mention the extreme weight of many of our engineering files. Usually don't have the budget to strip those files down to something more manageable.

[glorybound]

some of my scenes get large. I guess you never have to much hoursepower

Sorry for delay, gotta pay the bills.

If you aren't working with too many scenes with over 50 million polys, I would have tried out the Titan. It's almost half the cost of the Quadro K5000. If it didn't work out, I would look into the return policy.

Most of my scenes are HUGE! I use placeholders as much as I can, but towards the end, it takes too much time to swap between the different assets for rendering. Not to mention the extreme weight of many of our engineering files. Usually don't have the budget to strip those files down to something more manageable.

[trixian]

Would it not be more logical to go for the GTX 780Ti now instead of the Titan? Variants should probably pop up with comparable amounts of ram any time soon too.

I'm curious to find out how working in the original application these body-objects were created in, fares with the GTX line. I have this "belief" that body-objects in max are implemented in a really bad way (as per Autodesk standards).
I also generally find body objects in max to be infuriatingly limited and buggy, and whenever I get one, I promptly and carefully convert it to a poly model and clean it up for a superior subD workflow.

It seems to me that the barrier here is more about how the applications talk to the hardware, and what api they are using, more than anything specifically missing from the hardware in consumer cards.
This is evident by looking at some of the insane stuff people can do with consumer cards when writing for the hardware (in a more direct manner).
AMD's new approach should be interesting, or something similar for Nvidia, in the coming time. They want to let people code more directly to the hardware than before, and not force them to be a slave to MS direct3d or openGL's calls.

[Donald2B]

Trixian, at first I thought it too was just Autodesk's poor implementation of body objects, but that's not the case. We also have many of the native packages that these files were created in, and without a Quadro card are simply unusable. We had a very small design that should have easily run on our GTX 680, but crawled to the point we could not even orbit the model. Countless hours were spent with support. It just came down the fact that saving a little money was costing us WAY more in lost productivity. Just swapping the card was like going from an old 486 computer to a dual Xeon workstation!

I've been told many different things about how the hardware is different between the two cards. They share the same GPU, but everything else is different. I don't know how much I believe all that, I just know that the performance gains we get here are easily worth the cost of admission.

Like I try to say, it just depends on what you are trying to do. For most studios I have worked in, a GTX card would be perfectly fine, and we would probably not notice much improvement when stepping up to a Quadro card.

[trixian]

Well, I'm coming from a different viewpoint obviously, as I actually have never had any gains from Quadros, only worse performance. In all cases, a good gaming card absolutely destroys the Quadros, so much that recently, I work from home as much as possible on my personal self built rig instead of sitting at the office, up until the rendering stage. (As long as there is any significant modelling involved in the project).

Then again, as I mentioned, I don't really rely on working with solids (body-objects) other than for import once in a while.

But I must confess, I also passionately hate the whole concept of Quadros, as I know for a fact that earlier models were close to identical architecturally to gaming cards, and you could even flash your gaming card to become a Quadro, and it performed on par, except for the sometimes lower VRAM on gaming cards.
The whole pro graphic card marked is basically fake and propped up by the fact that businesses fork over a lot of cash quicker to avoid these issues when they arrive.
(Now and then, the pro cards have had specialized components to deal with legacy cad stuff admittedly, but the need for that is more of a weakness inherent in the industry, than a god-sent necessity).

There is astonishingly little technical innovation in this part of the industry. The real innovators are the entertainment industries, especially the VFX and gaming industry. This has been the trend since I got into the graphics business back in 1996.

Phew. Right, rant off