Quadro FX3500 or FX4500 ?

[atj-w]

Hi everyone, has anyone here actually tried a Quadro FX3500 and a FX4500? Is there a significant difference to justify the FX4500? The only quadro I have ever used was in my old Dell's M50.

 

I am using an old Geforce 6800, really slow as I am building a residential development of more than a dozen 2-storied houses with pools, landscape gardens(3D), surrounding forest(3D), a contoured landscape with roads..

 

Any advice?

 

Thanks

James

[tecton3d]

I have a 3400... which is the last-gen of the 3500 but have never been able to get my hands on a 4500 (yet)

 

Housekeeping: Are you organizing the scene? I just ask because even with a 4500, displaying all that geometry at once would be a stretch, even for a high-performance card. You should only have everything displayed when absolutely necessary... such as right before rendering. You can set objects/groups to be "displayed as box"es and that helps out tremendously when working with large files. Say your dozen, two story houses are finished, you can either hide them or make them a temporary group and make them boxes to they don't strain the video card. I just built some rendernodes and was playing with the ATI Rage XL8mb vid card that I had installed (since there was no onboard vid.) and was able to navigate surprisingly well in Max despite the underpowered card thanks to all the geometry being displayed as boxes.

 

what are the other specs of your system? If your cpu is underpowered or you are running out of ram, the fastest cpu in the world won't make your viewports fast.

CPU

amount of RAM

... ?

[atj-w]

Thanks Daron for the reply, I'm doing all that you have mentioned. Just that sometimes U face situations where u need to display a whole lot in detail, for example, the client can't visualize in boxes or even wireframes, they want to see shaded views..

 

I'm waiting for the dual Xeons (Woodcrest) to be built, so need to decide on the Quadro and to justify the purchase with my employer..

[tecton3d]

if you're trying to orbit/pan/zoom in realtime with the model fully textured to speak about/present the design then I'd say go for everything you can and get the 4500. There's nothing more annoying than trying to talk about and/or sell an idea and having to wait for your computer to catch up. At least with the 4500 you'd have the peace of mind knowing that you have the fastest GPU available:D

 

... and your boss is paying for it so definitely go with the 4500:p