Hi,
I’m looking at options for video cards for a new system. What are the best options for less than $400 ( MAX 2008, 2009, XP 64 bit)? I assume I am looking for Direct X performance, right? Thanks in advance.
For what it’s worth, I just purchased one of these. It’s brand new and sells for about $400.
(I work for NVIDIA so perhaps I am biased but I do pay for these myself )
If you are planning on using any apps that are CUDA, or OpenCL enabled then make sure you get a card that can support those standards.
Also, now that Photoshop is using GPU acceleration, I am finding I need way memory on the video card or I get problems launching any 3d app with Photoshop. The fx1800 has a pretty good amount of video memory.
Steve -what do you do at Nvidia?
ati?
FWIW, I have one running a Quadro FX1700 512MB, and one running geforce 8800GTS 640MB. The Geforce outperforms the Quadro, and was less expensive. I plan to try one of the Radeon HD cards next time around…
Hi Jujubee,
I work for the demo team - so we work in max, maya, etc. Vray is one of the tools we use and I use it for all of my personal work. I only mentioned NVIDIA because I would have felt bad giving any input into a video card question without giving some disclosure. 
Steve
Heh no worries. I’m sure we all appreciate your honesty. Most of us are professionals in a very small 3d community so it’s to be expected. I like Nvidia products anyways. That’s interesting to note that you guys use it. I’m surprised you guys never put it into benchmarks.
The only issue I’ve ever had with Nvidia (and most people using Max) is trying to determine why a Quadro could be better than let’s say a consumer model 280. Years ago, I wanted to check out a Quadro - at the time they were well over $2000, then everyone told me it’s not worth justifying the extra cost. I’d ask ‘what’ is the difference, and no one could really give me a clear answer.
I’m still left wondering about this to this day. Maybe it’s more noticeable in other applications which may take advantage of their features.
Just get the best consumer/gaming nvidia card you can afford with your budget. Geforces are excellent cards and are more than enough to do the job. (taking into account that there is no perfect solution)
Ive never really understood the massive price difference between the Quadro and Geforce type cards either, especially when the Geforce cards outperform the Quadro. Plus, your games are more likely to run on the Geforce without problems..
I’ve always got the entry level Quadro cards. My main need is to improve wire frame display speed. I’m considering an ATI Radeon HD 4870 1 GB, or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 896 MB. any thoughts about these cards or similar models?
Without seeing a benchmark, I’m not positive regular GeForces outperform Quadros.
Gaming was a huge factor for me too. I liked to design, but it was also important to have a card for the games.
Although in recent years, I haven’t had too many good titles.
I use my 2 machines for 3ds max and Photoshop, no gaming at all, and my GeForce at least seems to outperform the Quadro in my larger scenes.
@arobbert, somewhere here is a thread all about this, especially the Radeon vs. Nvidia subject, wish I had bookmarked it.
Thank you for all of your replies. I won’t need it for games and seldom use a shaded view port although I like the new hidden line shader in 2009. Does that make a difference in the card selection? What are most people on a budget using these days?
I’ll qualify my answer by saying that I am not brilliant when it comes to technical details. I’m an artist not an engineer.
My understanding is that one of the main benefits to using Quadro is that the drivers are optimized specifically for CAD/CAM style professional use. So there are speed optimizations, quality optimizations, etc. There are teams of people dedicated to this and they work directly with the people that make the software. Same thing on the GeForce side when it comes to games. They are different teams with different focuses. How a Quadro performs vs. GeForce will vary depending on what app you are using since they all vary a great deal. Some functions are accelerated in Quadro that are not accelerated with GeForce so a faster Geforce may or may not be able to keep up with a Quadro.
There are also Quadro-specific features that you can’t get with GeForce. Wireframe acceleration and Order-Independent Transparency come to mind. Not sure if these are still exclusive features but these features are critical for certain applications.
Also, with Quadro you get WHQL certification with all of the major CAD/CAM apps. so they are certified to work well with professional tools.
I usually just buy the midrange Quadro for home use, right now that’s about $400.
For People using Max a Quadro is a bit of a waste of money, Max performs better with Direct X which means a game card is better in most ways. A Quadro is great is you need a lot of transparency in the view or are working with an Open GL app.
Hmmm, I guess that’s my dilemma. Direct X is the new direction for max and most of the “workstation” cards are optimized for OGL, right? If this is the case are the Direct X drivers in a Quadro better than a Geforce. What do the Maxtreme drivers (that I saw in a recent post are being discontinued) use?
I think the intention of Quadro is to give you a better experience in max no matter the API. What that means without the performance driver in max I don’t know. I use maya and a few other tools as well although max remains my 3d app of choice.
I know with Quadro I’ll get perfect wireframes with complex meshes and since I want to make heavy use of polygons using tools like GrowFX I stick with Quadro. Wireframes are one of the areas that is very different from what a game card is optimized for. Speed is an issue with wireframes and accuracy as well. The other issue is that the scene graph in a 3d app can make a big difference for performance, so the raw power of a graphics card is gonna matter but so are those app-specific optimizations.
I think it’s partly a matter of taste. If I was going to play games on my workstation and wanted a system for both work and play I’d probably go with a high-end gaming card. Also, if you churn through systems quickly, a gaming card makes more sense because you can get cheap raw performance and update more often.
Personally, I hate updating machines (with a dozen node-locked applications to move) so I try to go for the best, most-stable setup I can afford and leave it intact for awhile.
Anyway, I hope that helps. I don’t work on the technical side, so this is just my take on things from an artist’s perspective.
If Maxstreme is being discontinued ther eis even less reason to use a Quadro for Max.
At my old place I had a Quadro 4600 SLI setup and my Gaming card kept up with it even when it ran Maxstreme. Wireframes were nicer but not 5X the price nicer…
I’ll throw in my 10 cents worth. MAXtreme is a live and well. It now comes bundled with the Quadro video card driver. When you run Max for the first time it will detect that there is a performance driver and ask if you want to install it. The last couple of MAXtreme versions have been based on DirectX and NOT OpenGL like in the past. I have been doing some testing with a GeForce GTX280 vs. Quadro FX4500. There is definitely a hardware generation difference between them, but in many cases the Quadro still performs the best under all situations. Especially if there are lots of VRay Proxies (don’t know why, but it does). I was always under the same impression that there was never a good reason for buying a Quadro until I started doing more testing and running into little snags here or there with the game cards. Right now, I am no longer recommending any game card for our production environment due to some of these problems. I do use a GTX295 @ home and love it, but that computer is used more for general purpose and some random zombie killing. 
The Quadro FX4500 and GTX280 are both at work and I have been swapping them in and out of the same Dual Quad Core Xeon (XPx64 & Vista x64) for all testing purposes. Cheers!