Looking at GPU prices here in the UK a Quadro 2000 is priced almost exactly the same as a GeForce GTX 680. In the past we’ve always bought Quadros, but if you were building a cheapish workstation to use for general 3ds Max use which GPU would you go for?
I use a bit of RT when setting up lighting/textures etc, and final frames would be rendered on our farm, so we’re not looking to do final frames on RT, but I would like to use RT more (it’s a bit slow on a Q2000). Also, how does the viewport performance in Max compare between using a Q2000 or GTX580 these days? Seeing as 3ds Max now has it’s own Nitrous viewport driver I was wondering if powerful gaming cards give worse, the same or better performance than a Quadro.
Our main work is architectural visualisation with very high poly counts, loads of proxies and massive textures.
That’s comparing a $400 card to an $1800 one… The difference in performance taking that into account is something I can quite easily live with. And that’s a generation behind, the 680 should do even better (and has more memory)
Yep, being stingey here and got a 660 ti for my latest build. Maybe I’m totally missing out but I haven’t switched over to using RT yet. The geforce stuff have always done really well for a third of the price of a good quadro so I’m happy enough with that.
Just switched from a Quadro2000 to a GF680. I think the 680 is a much better buy. I have tried a Quadro card that was worth the cost of it.
The viewport performance in 2013 is a lot worse though. My coworkers have experienced the same thing, and some use quadro and some use gf. Doesn’t seem to matter.
I wonder why people don’t want to wait for a more better card in general? I read that 6 series is the weakest of the keplers and a more powerful ones will be coming…I personally will wait them out to release a good card, like 580 for example I cant see how you can pay $1,000 for a card these days (not the 660 ti one).
Thanks for all the answers!
So it would seem that the depressing truth is that to get decent viewport performance in max you need a Quadro 2000 or higher, which is then not as good at all the other stuff, such as RT, and comes with half the memory on it. The cheapest Quadro with 2GB of ram is the 4000 which costs about £700 here in the UK. We’re getting seriously shafted by the GPU makers.
Yep - I bought a Fire GL 1 back about 10 years ago which was okay in max performance wise but it was incredibly inflexible for 2d and video work, and at the time sucked for games - That got replaced soon after with a geforce 2 GTS which was about a quarter of the price and I promised never to spend money on a pro card again. I’d rather put the cash into a render node or more ram.
Nope. The GTX 680 is a lot better than the Quadro2000 (atleast from my own experience over the past year). The performance in Photoshop (and a lot of other programs) is a whole lot better with the 680 compared to the Q2000 aswell.
I don’t know what kind of scenes you are dealing with, but I have a 1.5gig GTX480 which was released spring 2010 and in Max 2012 with Nitrous on I can easily deal with scenes that have tens of millions of polygons.
Thanks again for the responses. I’m going to give a GTX680 a go next week when I make the next office workstation. I’ll let you know how it compares to a Q2000 in identical scenes. If the worst comes to the worst (which I doubt, having read people’s opinions here) I can always get a refund for it
The number of polygons isn’t the only thing that sets the framerate in Max. The number of objects is actually more important. A scene with one object with 10 million polygons will have a lot better performance than a scene with a million objects with 10 polygons each.
I often have to deal with models from Revit or Autocad which aren’t that heavy polygon wise, but have thousands of objects. Merging them all into one object speeds up things a lot, but that isn’t a very good solution. My experience with the Quadro 2000 is that it isn’t a very good card for Max. Or Photoshop. Or overall. DEFINITELY not worth the price.
I’ll chime in here as I have done in similar threads earlier.
I have had a range of cards, Quadros and gamer cards (though all from Nvidia), over the years, and I have yet to come across a Quadro that performs as well as a gamer card.
As far as I am concerned, they are a scam aimed at the rather slow minded corporate folks, as they seemingly don’t seem to mind dishing out 20k (norwegian crowns) for these cards.
What really worries me is this close and cosy relationship between AD and Nvidia. This is most likely really bad for the majority of max-users, as I would not be surprised if they later on completely exclude the gamer cards from working with 3dsmax.
I never buy the cheapest gamer cards though, but go for the sweet spot which usually is the 2nd one down from the top models, like the 580 (was) when I bought it.
Here at work, my Quadro 5000 is very much inferior to my 580 at home (both in 3dsmax design 2012). The workstation I had before my current, originally came with a Quadro 4000 from back in 2008, and I later on changed the Quadro for a geforce 470, and it was incredible the performance increase it gave.
On some projects its so bad I often work from home on my models if they are anywhere close to complex. I then render them here at work so all the slaves help in when everything is set up.
I still haven’t tried 2013 at home, but seeing as people have noticed it has issues with non-Quadro cards, I might not. 2013 here at work is slightly slower than 2012 for viewport navigation, but seems snappier when it comes to opening and closing windows (VFB for example).
Thought I’d give a quick update on my recent purchase. I’ve just finished putting together a new workstation for the office, which I would characterise as mid-range. It doesn’t have dual processors, but does have a 6-core i7, 32GB ram, SSD, so it’s reasonably quick.
For the first time I went with a gaming card over a Quadro, and as suggested went for the 2GB GTX680. I haven’t fully benchmarked it, or done anything too scientific, but I have compared a typical arch-vis scene in Max on an identical workstation, except for it having a Quadro 2000 GPU. This is a working model with a few million polys and a decent number of 3000px square textures. These two graphic cards cost almost exactly the same here in the UK
The Max viewport - Nitrous 2013 - is about 80% as fast on the GTX680 as the Q2000, so a small advantage to Quadro. Viewport texture quality is pretty much identical as far as I can make out
V-Ray RT on the GTX680 is at least 5 times faster than the Q2000! Plus the card has twice as much memory (2GB vs 1GB) so can do RT on larger scenes.
Therefore I think I have chosen well with the GTX680. It’s a little bit slower in the viewport but massively faster in RT. Thanks to everyone for their advice.
- That got replaced soon after with a geforce 2 GTS which was about a quarter of the price and I promised never to spend money on a pro card again. I’d rather put the cash into a render node or more ram.