CGarchitect's Graphics Card Round Up

[Jeff Mottle]

CGarchitect has just wrapped up one of the most intensive and exhaustive reviews we have ever done. Our graphics card round up reviews the top graphics cards from NVIDIA and ATI and evaluates performance in the top apps in our industry as well as how professional series cards stack up against consumer cards.

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[Derek Forreal]

fantastic article - thanks so much for this. it really helps to explain the differences between gamer and workstation cards.

and also threw up some unexpected results - 5870 in AutoCAD for example!

[Jeff Mottle]

You're welcome. Yeah there really were some inconstant results between cards. Especially in AutoCAD when it really depends what type of viewport shading you use most.

[philip kelly]

I read the only real report back from Siggraph on cgsociety and the vrayinfo site.
They show a screen shot of a 5,000 pixel real time render with 3 no. fX 4800 Graphics Cards.

I am to take it if one is to jump on to all this new GPU hipe at the moment you need to spent 3,500 euros on a graphics cards to get good results?
Not really a big leap forward if it costs us that much, we will have to push that on to our clients and they won't see why.
Can some body straighten me out here.

phil


Thanks

[Jeff Mottle]

I read the only real report back from Siggraph on cgsociety and the vrayinfo site.
They show a screen shot of a 5,000 pixel real time render with 3 no. fX 4800 Graphics Cards.

I am to take it if one is to jump on to all this new GPU hipe at the moment you need to spent 3,500 euros on a graphics cards to get good results?
Not really a big leap forward if it costs us that much, we will have to push that on to our clients and they won't see why.
Can some body straighten me out here.

phil


Thanks

It's not cheap at the moment no, even the V-Ray RT GPU demo used 3 GTX 480 cards which is about $1500 total. Keep in mind this is the bleeding edge and new cards are coming out every 6 months or so. I've said it before, but I'll say it again - This IS going to change everything and how the vast majority of our industry operates. Between RT GPU rendering, cloud GPU farms and simplified apps, it's going to be a huge paradigm shift. It's not going to happen next week, but I would be keeping my eye on GPU developments VERY closely as it's going to affect MANY people in this industry. I'll be posting all of our V-Ray 2.0 videos as well as V-Ray RT GPU stuff in the next few days. I'm editing the video as I type this.

[Andrew Lynn]

It's promising anyway, in that these demos do show GPU hardware doing these tasks faster than CPUs (currently) do. One can envision that there's going to come a point where release versions of these programs hit the market that can be used on production animation work, or that do other useful things like make high end VR walkthroughs render in real time, and if you can get $1500 or even $5000 worth of GPU hardware to do the job of CPU hardware cost more than that, there will be a market for the technology.

[philip kelly]

So the million dollar question?

Which one are ya's all going for, and how much will it cost to set up.

I would love to know what people are gearing up for, as I am little confused at the moment.

Phil

It's promising anyway, in that these demos do show GPU hardware doing these tasks faster than CPUs (currently) do. One can envision that there's going to come a point where release versions of these programs hit the market that can be used on production animation work, or that do other useful things like make high end VR walkthroughs render in real time, and if you can get $1500 or even $5000 worth of GPU hardware to do the job of CPU hardware cost more than that, there will be a market for the technology.

[Andrew Lynn]

Don't gear up. It's never profitable to buy computer equipment earlier than you have to - just wait until the software you want to use becomes available, then buy the hardware it runs on.

[philip kelly]

so update vray and rt and then leave it lie for a while, and see what the trend is ?

[Andrew Lynn]

Unless something recently slipped past my notice, Vray RT for GPU has not hit release yet - unless you're in the beta program (which would mean you're probably not supposed to be talking about it here) a high end GPU won't help you.