Choosing a right video card.

[Dario Arnaez]

Hi guys, I want to know your personal recomendations for to choice a good video card for a Workstation. I work with 3DMax, Z-Brush, Photoshop and sometimes Adobe Premiere. In the current desktop I'm using a Nvidia Quadro FX500 with 128 mb. However whem I play a animation in the camera viewport it run with freezing behaviors... the meterial editor is so slowly for to show all the material (VRayMtl).

My provider choose a:

MSI NX7900GT-T2D256E GeForce 7900GT 256 Mb GDDR3

 

Is this enough?

 

Do you have any suggestions? I will appreciate it.

[AJLynn]

Well, the material editor performance depends much more on your CPU than on your video card - the first time you see any given sphere on the screen during your session, or when you change a material, it renders the sphere in Vray to display it. As far as freezing, before you buy new hardware I would recommend installing nVidia's latest release drivers and Maxtreme 8 - both are on the nVidia web site. I have a similar card on my work PC, and unless I'm doing very complicated work (Max files over 30-40MB or so), when used with recent drivers and Maxtreme it's good enough.

[Dario Arnaez]

Thanks AJLynn. I think it work now. But anyway, I need to choose a good card for the new machine that I'll to purchase.

 

Any suggestion? The technician recommend the "MSI NX7900GT-T2D256E Geforce 7900GT 256MB GDDR3" because it has faster video ram, 256-bit interface support, and it has 24 pixel pipelines. But I don't know what are he talking. I would to know your opinions about this.

 

Same is for the chip selection...

Athlon64 FX-62 (2.6GHz)/ AM2/ 2x 1MB L2 and 2x 128K L1 Cache

or

Any AMD Opteron?

[AJLynn]

Depends on budget. The FX62 is a very expensive option but right now it's the fastest single-socket option you have. If your timeframe is to buy in a month or two, wait for Intel's next release - these chips will give significantly better price/performance at the higher end and AMD will drop their prices at the same time. If you need to buy now and money is not a problem, look at dual-dual Opteron systems. If money is tighter, look at Athlon64 X2.

 

The 7900GT is very good. Might be overkill. It's expensive, and at these prices (if that's your budget) you could be looking at Quadro cards. If your budget isn't huge, a less expensive Geforce card would be a good option.

[Dario Arnaez]

Ok great. Thank you for the advice. I think taht I can wait for that Intel release. Today a friend told me the same about a dual-dual Opteron systems. However I have a problem about that I think. The issue is, I need to work under Windows XP Pro, at least in XP 64 bit Edition and I don't know if Windows XP it will work fine with multiprocessors. Do you know something about that?

 

Talking about video cards I have a question: How important is an expensive (7900GT) or a Quadro or a cheap GeForce at the time of to render? or when I will enjoy the money spended?

 

 

Thank you so much your comments.

[AJLynn]

XP Pro is as good as Windows gets for handling up to 4 cores. For tasks like rendering that parallelize easily, you'll get very high, though not 100%, efficiency. 64-bit XP is also fine for multiprocessors, though they say it can be hard to find drivers for some hardware, and Max isn't set up to take advantage of the upgrade anyway. (Maybe next version will be better - I haven't heard anything - but there should be an announcement at Siggraph in early August.)

 

Video cards have nothing to do with render times - they can only speed up the display while you are using the editor or animation preview. The only things that speed up render time are faster CPUs and more RAM (and the RAM only helps if you hit your memory's limit during rendering).