Anyone else having problem with this graphics card? I have tried several drivers but after some minutes in max it will crash with the notifier in viewport “failed to initialize D3D…”
For now I have switched to OpenGL which works but is also very slow.
Perhaps this is not a very good graphics card (old too) but maybe someone has experience with it and could give some tips to which driver works the best?
Currently using driver from Nvidia version 91.36 forceware (winXPsp2), 3dsmax 2008, direct3D 9.0c I think…
Have also tried driver v162.65 and v162.167 without any luck.
Thanks for your reply!
Yes, tried but failed. The maxtreme driver install says it can not install because 3dsmax 9 can not be found. Which makes sense since I use 3dsmax 2008.
Couldn’t find a maxtreme driver for 3dsmax2008. Is there?
Anyway I installed the forceware driver v162.65 again and turned off the my antivirus program during install (RTFM) - think its working better now. It also might have been a conflict between programs using direct3d at the same time ,autocad2008 and max2008.
I’ve actually found that card to usually be faster in OGL than D3D anyway. The maxtreme drivers rely heavily on OGL. It just also impliments some D3D as well so it’s more of a best of both worlds.
Overall I’ve found the Nvidia cards to be quite buggy, but they don’t even compare to how buggy the ATI cards we had were, so I can’t complain much.
Are you running two monitors? They run much better on one. I live with the bugginess. I love my two monitors, and would love more.
According to Bobo of FranticFilms and the updater of the maxscript help since version 6, OpenGL hasn’t changed since like Max 5, here are some of his thoughts pasted from cgtalk
Hope it helps! Direct3D is much much much faster on our Quadro FX 4600 cards in the office.
Good to know. I’ve got a new machine on order. I don’t know what video card it comes with but it should be either the 4600 or the next one down. I’ll switch to D3D. OGL just causes way too many problems when too many apps are trying to use it at once.
We’ve been having major issues since our switch to WinXP 64-bit, Max2008, Quadro 4600 new machines, strange crashes, BSODs etc. Please let me know what your experience is with the new machine. The 4600 drivers are still fairly new so we suspect that’s the problem. I don’t want to sway you from the 4600 or anything, it’s a great card, but it’s been very frustrating for us, let me know
no worries. I don’t really have a choice in the matter. We were going to wait to go 64bit and everything, but then IT couldn’t run their corporate scripts and all that crap so we were waiting. Instead we’re just purchasing the machines that they will eventually go 64bit with. I’ll report results if we ever switch to 64bit. For now we’re just going to be stuck with only 4Gigs of mem in a 32bit environment.
I think the machine will actually be packed with 8Gigs of memory though. It’ll be such a waste of extra power just sitting there until we get the new software.
Max 2008 sucked in 32bit though also. After I installed the 2 plugins we used and opened some things I crashed pretty much right after opening a couple scenes. That new adaptive degradation really sucks. It crashed constantly. I turned that off and didn’t get as many crashes, but it didn’t seem that stable. Since 2009 is coming in a couple months we’ll just wait to see if that is stable to see if we should update to anything or stick with 9. 2008 really doesn’t do anything for us here, so there’s no point yet. The viewport didn’t seem any faster at all with my video card and the adaptive degradation was crap for the kind of models we work with.
I’ll keep everyone filled in with any major change though, good or bad. Of course, if it’s bad it’ll come off as more of a complaint. lol
hm. x64 and 2k8 is a breeze here on an 8800gtx. the degradation feels really smooth. I went up to 118 mio polys in the viewport without crashing. 20mio still felt workable. (And that was real world polys, not instanced teapots, but multiple fullres textured car datasets).
That figures. Seems like Max has always done well with consumer cards, and not so well with the pro cards. I’m stuck with a Quadro card though. I could get the NVS cards, but those suck and probably still have the same problems with max.
Superb information! Strange - One should think that an expensive “pro” card should work with any software… Would love to use D3D but it crashes all the time. Maybe I’ve overlooked some settings in the GPU’s software… Max won’t even start with the maxtreme driver.
Yes - this sounds frustratingly familiar. I too recently bought (for the first time) a pro card. An FX4600 infact at great expense and find it unstable and crashy under Direct3d. I always used gaming cards in the past which were fast but a bit artifacty, assuming in the back of my mind that one day I would get a ‘proper’ card and cut through geometry like a machine.
It is unacceptable how poorly the Quadro seems to perform in MAX - with either MAXstream openGL or direct 3d. Why is this? Why are so many people being ripped off here and why does it continue top happen unchecked?
I also understand (strangely) that Quadro’s are actually the SAME as GeForce cards, but just with a few minor differences and disconnections!?!
Nvidia should hang their heads in shame over this.
If you have an app that’s straight up OGL then the quadro cards make an enormous difference. They work great in maya. Max just has a strange interface.
We get them here mostly because of Rhino and ProE. I don’t really use ProE unless someone gives me a file in the native format, but it makes a huge difference in Rhino since it uses OGL.
So we aren’t really getting ripped off. I mean, half of what we pay for is the software/drivers I’m sure. Yes, the cards are Very similar, but I think different enough. In the past there were some hardware hacks that would allow you to make the computer think it was a quadro and use the other software. That’s the part that seems a little crappy.