graphics cards

[cdavis]

I'm after some advice.

i want to build myself a workstation at home for my 3D & want to know what graphics card route to go down if money is no object. Do i go quadro or the GTX range.

mainly running maya & vray RT

Thanks for your time


Chris

[Yannick]

Hi Chris,
is money is not an issue, the Quadro is good, but get anything from the Quadro 4000 and above.
For the price of a quadro 4000 you can get a top of the range Geforce. The Geforce GTX580 seems to work fine (maybe a couples of glitches in Maya).
I don't know if the GTX590 works, I would also like to know if someone tested it.
Just be aware that none of the Geforce are officially supported, so if you have problems, it is difficult to have support from Autodesk.
Another thing to keep in mind is the power consumption of theses cards and the number of slot they take.

Yannick

[stezza]

Well you don't have to spend that much money, I just bought a quadro600 for £150 and works very well no issues with it's performance at all and with 1gig memory works well with very large scenes

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Gtx 580 3 gb size and u will love it for both viewport and gpu rendering.

[RobPhoboS]

I think some proper stats would be useful on a range of cards, from budget/mid/high quadro's & geforces.
Something I'm really keen to know as well.

Personally (sorry Chris to jump in) I'm more interested in faster render speeds at the moment.
The RT is fantastic for feedback, I love it but at the end we are rendering on CPU's (right?) so I personally don't want to spend too much on GPU. (unless I'm missing a trick here )

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

There was another topic where some1 was comparing few top end quatro with gtx models. And gtx was only a little slower but thousands of ££ cheaper...

[RobPhoboS]

What are the key ingredients that will get quicker results when using RT on a GPU ?
I'm just trying to scope out a couple of options for a tiny, tiny budget, and of course looking at the GPU benchmark thread as well.

[vlado]

Pretty much only the GPU and the PCIe speed matter.

Best regards,
Vlado

[RobPhoboS]

Thanks for that, there's a lot of smoke and mirrors, so it's hard to guess exactly what is controlling it.
Is the amount of ram (on the gpu) a 3rd place to those ?

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Number of Cuda Cores
GPU Speed

That what u want to have as high as u can from what I know.

An obviously the memory to be more than what u need in ur scenes...

[RobPhoboS]

Well I personally only use the RT to check the materials on the object I'm working on, not usually an entire scene, also because that's usually comp'd in NUKE as well.
One thing I'm just looking into are the ATI card, they have a lot more 'stream processors' but what do they equate to in terms of Nvidia's 'cores' ? (3:1?)

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Ati is bad atm - they drivers are bad and so on.

ATI top end GPU is 20x slower than nvidia top end gpu from what I remember....

[cdavis]

this is quite useful. im sure some of you have already found it. but....

http://jeffpatton.net/2010/11/gtxqua.../#comment-2014

[cdavis]

& this

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

[RobPhoboS]

Cheers for that.
I know there are plenty of posts in the forum, just a case of wading through a lot of it.
I've pretty much made up my mind on what I'll pick up now. (GeForce GTX 560 Ti 2Gb or GTX 570 1.25Gb - can't decide really - price will)