Graphic Card Recommendation pls~

[Gothra]

Our company will soon be investing into Rhino + Vray for architectural
rendering (was using 3DMax and FormZ)
and I would love to hear some advice & recommendation concerning the
following:

1) ATI or nVidia?
2) Workstation card or Gaming card? (eg. nVidia GeForce 8800GTX or nVidia
Quadro FX4600)

Especially the second question I'm curious whether its beneficial to invest
into an expensive workstation card if I'm only producing architectural
stills but not animation.

Thanks advance for the help,
best regards,

Jacky Lok

[andreas]

Re: Graphic Card Recommendation pls~

Hello Jacky,

1)from my personal experience, doing mainly architectural visualizations, I would strongly recommend a nvidia card, since the ATIs have quite a history of driver related problems (our laptops have ATI cards...). Nvidias open gl driver proved quite reliable around here.

2)Since we never bought a workstation card, i cannot give you a very profound answer here, but we alway buy "good" gaming cards out of the 250 € range, the new generation of cards like 8800 gts are performing absolutely sufficient for our projects which include things like soccer stadiums and heavy detailed facades. I think that the pro cards really have an advantage when displaying huge quantities of lines...

when you want to do architectural renderings, the approximately 1000 € more you would spent for a pro card, could also be spent on a quadcore renderslave, which would boost up your rendering times pretty good.

my 0,02

Andy

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Graphic Card Recommendation pls~

1) well its an underground fact that ATI cards don't really work well with Rhino. So from a purely Rhino view Nvidias are really the way to go. Personally, I've had an ATI card and currently have nvidia cards on 2 of my computers. Have I noticed a difference...a little bit, but I've also heard horror stories. Take all of that for what it is.

2) To be honest I don't think it matters too much as long as you get a good card. A workstation card would be better suited for working with Rhino, but for 90% of people you probably won't be able to tell the difference. Again I have a computer with a workstation card and a laptop with gaming card, and the difference is not so drastic that it make a huge difference one way or the other.

[magnatizerr]

Re: Graphic Card Recommendation pls~

Hi Jacky

I totally agree with Dalomar, 90% of people wouldn't tell the difference in the general day to day stuff.

Having said that I've recently upgraded to a Quadra FX3500 runing in a Dell percision 490 and although I've not really pushed it too much so far, I've been really impressed with it. (Running XP pro)

Budget however will pay a large part in your decission making, it might be worth spending the money on the CPU's? My new unit has twin quad cores xeons in it and it makes me smile every time I see eight render buckets running around the screen when I press the render button!!

[Travis Serio_cg]

Re: Graphic Card Recommendation pls~

8 cores... ahh to dream. I envy you :'(

The problem with ATI is that they have always had their own unique interpretation of OpenGL. Because of that, you can have very bad results, or very good results. I have never found good luck with them.. ever. About once every 4 or 5 years they sucker me in with some fantastic stats on one of their cards. I tell myself "i know i shouldn't" but I do it. Then it doesn't work for crap and I go ... I knew I shouldn't have bought that crap.

Stick with Nvidia. Why? Because they work. If you do heavy poly crunching opt for the Quadro line, otherwise, one of their high end gaming cards will get the job done just as well and leave time for gaming as well ;D

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Graphic Card Recommendation pls~

Travis's advice is good. Its not that the ATIs are any less capable on paper, its just that how they run (firmware, drivers) is not that good. Don't be enticed by the stats because some rhino users have had very well spec'd cards, but have still had problems with them.

[Gothra]

Re: Graphic Card Recommendation pls~

Tyvm your replies are VERY helpful.
/salute

I think I'll shoot for the 8800GTX first then.
Sli anyone? keke, heard its not mature yet tho.

/also envy twin quad core.

regards,
Jacky

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Graphic Card Recommendation pls~

Rhino should take full advantage of sli. From what Andy[le bihan] has told me and what I've heard from Jeff[LaSor] is that there's nothing from rhino's end that needs to be done for sli to work, so give it a go if you want to fork over the money for it. Personally there's a few more things that I would spend my money on before using it on a card (RAM, Processors). BTW, just so you know graphics cards won't help with the rendering...only with working in rhino

[Gothra]

Re: Graphic Card Recommendation pls~

Further enquiry

So if money is not a problem, would option A & B be better?

A:
Intel Core2 Quad 6600 2.4GHz
4Gb RAM
NVidia Quadro FX3500 250M (256MB)

B:
Intel Core2 Quad 6600 2.4GHz
4Gb RAM
NVidia 8800GTX (512 or 768MB)

The reason I asked is, the technical support guy of our company told me that under the 32bit environment of WinXP & Rhino itself, only a maximum of 4Gb RAM can be utilized. And that includes system RAM + graphic card RAM, so the more RAM of the card would cause more system RAM to be left wasted.

Just curious if this is true? Sorry for the endless queries ;D

regards,
Jacky Lok

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Graphic Card Recommendation pls~

Natively, 32bit windows will only use 2gb. I've heard that 4gb is the absolute limit, but I've only seen it implemented with 3gb. In order to use more then 2gb then you will have to have a switch (something that goes in the boot.ini file) that will allow windows to access more ram (just search google for 3gb switch and it should come up). From a ram perspective 64bit windows is a better way to go, but you have to make that call for yourself. As far as video memory affecting total system memory, that I've never heard. Video memory never touches system memory, so I don't think it would matter if you got the card with more ram. Keep in mind that RAM isn't the only way to measure a card, so just because the 3500 is 256mb doesn't mean that its worse. Either way both look like good cards/systems so you're fine there. Look into the 3gb/4gb switch and give 64bit a look while you're at it.

[Micha_cg]

Re: Graphic Card Recommendation pls~

The switch will help to use 3GB for multiple tasks, but not for a single taks, if I'm right informed. Only a 64bit system will allow a single Rhino 4 task to use approx. max. 3.6GB. I like XP64, it's stable and light for the RAM. Good for work engines.

Some days befor I have read that XP will come back. Microsoft will bring a new XP SP with some features of Vista. So, the SR will not be a bug fix and security release only.

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Graphic Card Recommendation pls~

Well I've heard that vista SP1 is a few months away...I've also heard that they postponed the discontinuing of XP for another 6 months. What this all means I have no idea. I know that they [microsoft] have been getting a backlash on vista. Which, IMHO, they probably wouldn't have gotten if they weren't so adamant about shoving it down the publics' throat. I dual booted my new (4-months) laptop, and even though I would rather use XP, vista wasn't as horrible as it was made out to be...however, since I can't run all the stuff I need to on it that limits me.