which video card?

[renevc]

I am buying a new Pc and wonder what is the way to go regarding the choice of a videocard? My supplier gives me the choice between a geforce quadro620 and a quadro 2000.
Is the 2000 worth the extra money?

regards, René

[fooprobe]

You don't want the GeForce - it's a gaming card, you won't be happy. Not sure whether the difference between the two quadros is worth the $$, someone else will have to chime in.

[MvyessSA]

Hi, there are many threads on this on the discourse rhino forum, but basically for good Rhino viewport performance and nice anti-aliased thin lines in Rhino viewport go with quadro.
The Gtx620 Geforce card is very low on the food chain, and not good for much more than office work.
The only advantage that Geforce cards have over quadros is that they normally have more cuda cores and at a lower cost, which is useful if you plan to use V-Ray RT GPU rendering. If GPU rendering is your goal then the GTX620 is still not a good option anyway, as for that purpose you should look at the higher end Geforce cards ending with 70 or 80 eg. 670,680,770,780,970,980 etc. - Michael VS

[renevc]

I was mistaking myself. It is not about a geforce card but about two quadro cards the 620 and the 2000. Or maybe even another one. It has to work with rhino 5.

[renevc]

Thanks for your input. The choice was between a nvidia quadro k620 and a quadro 2000. I mistakingly mentioned the geforce card. I saw a lot of posts on the rhino forum but non of them is very clear on what card to choose. Some say it should be a high end GTX card and others insist on a quadro card.The k620 seems to be a bit on the low side. Also there are posts that say i should use a 256 bits card for rendering purposes which brings me in the quadro 3000 series if i am right
RT rendering would be nice but not at any cost. I want to speed up my rendering time. So i am a bit in the dark here. I do not mind to spend some extra money if it really makes a difference.
Also the issue if a good card for rhino also is a good card for vray. So a good advice would be greatly appreciated.

[MvyessSA]

Hi. For Rhino viewport experience I would use a quadro, having used multiple geforce and quadros in the past.
The question as to which quadro depends more on the size and complexity of the models you will be working on. Larger models with more details and complex parts require:
1. More GPU ram 2. More powerful quadro to bring it all to the screen viewport and not stutter etc.. So a k620 could look as good as a k4000 etc. with a small model but with a very complex model you will see the difference in smoothness when moving around the model.
Combined with this Rhino viewport experience as well as normal V-Ray rendering performance are directly linked to CPU type.
Rhino is a single thread app so for good Rhino viewport performance a faster CPU with 2 cores will often outperform a slower CPU with 4x Cores because only 1 core is used to do all the math before feeding it to the GPU to display it.
V-Ray on the other hand wants as many cores as it can get and thrives on more cores (and threads=Hyper Threading) for rendering.
So you can look at various options as far as I can see to balance CPU/GPU/Rendering performance:
1. Get the fastest 4xCore(HT=8xThread) CPU that fits in your budget. (Rhino Viewport and V-Ray now happy)
2. Get a Quadro GPU that can cope with the model sizes you deal with on a daily basis, without giving you 2 frames per second stop motion in your viewport. I haven't used the K620 but from what I can see it has similar or better performance to the older Quadro2000 card which is not a weak card by any means. Perhaps you can request feedback on the Rhino forum from users with the k620? Michael VS

[renevc]

Thanks a lot. Piece by piece thinks are getting more clearly now. I am currently working with a geforce GT 220 so i guess any quadro will be an improvement. I sometimes work with large interior scenes where i cannot use a rendered viewport because rhino almost freezes than and things get really slow.
I understood from a hardware site that the K620 was a low end model, K2000 a middle range and from 3000 upwards you should be in heaven. But this was a site regarding notebooks.
Is it necessary to have a 256 bits card?
My cpu will be a i74770 or will a Processor 1 x Intel Xeon E5-1620 / 3.6 GHz ( 3.8 GHz ) ( Quad-Core ) be a better choice. I also put the question on the rhino forum.

[MvyessSA]

GTX220 was a good card. It was made pre-Nvidia geforce cad crippling which started with the 400 series geforce.
Bits and bobs... Higher bit rate for a card just means that it can get more data between the GPU and it's RAM per clock cycle. To get a better idea of performance you should rather look at the memory throughput eg. 140Gb/s. This basically takes the clock speed x the bit rate.
Eg. a 128bit card running at 1200Mhz has the same throughput ability as a 256bit card running at 600Mhz. (Very Roughly)
Note(The manufacturer listed throughput also takes into account memory clock speeds)
So once you've compared throughput between cards then you can look at Cuda cores and then a card with more cuda cores but similar throughput normally wins, but then there is another snag because not all cuda cores were created equal.. By my reading it seems asif 1 x Fermi Cuda core (400/500 series) has approximately the same performance as 2 x Kepler Cuda cores.(600/700 Series). Fermi was designed with compute processing as a goal, Kepler was designed with power saving as a goal.
Hope this helps. Michael VS