Sticky: Video card buying advice

[RyderSK]

I already observed and wrote here that Max2014 is extremely efficient in shaded viewport with latest GTX. I have Max2014 and gtx670 and it's absolutely flawless and I push polygons into absurd numbers (hundreds of milions). It might be possible Quadro simply lost its purpose for Max ? Unless you work purely within wireframe or OpenGL mode,etc.

[thiyagu arjunan]

while comparing with max desing2013 is working so grt than max2014..viewport is so crisp and shadows r too good in realistic mode and speed navigation too good in max desing.... so wat s the diff? max and max design? sdk..am not able to undestand that thing..pls can anyone tel me wat to do and which one i can choose?

[numerobis]

while comparing with max desing2013 is working so grt than max2014..viewport is so crisp and shadows r too good in realistic mode and speed navigation too good in max desing.... so wat s the diff? max and max design? sdk..am not able to undestand that thing..pls can anyone tel me wat to do and which one i can choose?

er... maybe you should read the topic title again...

[Zdravko Barisic]

I already observed and wrote here that Max2014 is extremely efficient in shaded viewport with latest GTX. I have Max2014 and gtx670 and it's absolutely flawless and I push polygons into absurd numbers (hundreds of milions). It might be possible Quadro simply lost its purpose for Max ? Unless you work purely within wireframe or OpenGL mode,etc.

 

Nowadays, Quadro is for apps like C4D od Maya or any other OGL/NURBS based soft, since 20II there is NO any more MAXtreme D3D driver for MAX.

So, for the MAX, Quadro is useless.

But, I still have a friends who claims that on some way, quadro still runs smoother, with bug huges scenes...

Also, you probably noticed, that with every new version of MAX viewport runs on different way

...and for the end, XP x64 is still a beast in viewport

 

 

Hi Dimitris,

 

you've got me very interested in the Quadro....

 

I havent been on forum for years .... you can freely forget the quadro, GTX 780 maybe should be better investment.

The whole legend about Quadro comes from GF 2 and GF 4 times, including FX5800 finishing with 7900GTO, in that times improvment was impressing, over 4-5 times

...

Edited July 2, 2013 by okmijun

[thiyagu arjunan]

Hi

 

Finally i replaced my new quadro k2000 and got GTX 770 2bg card and its god damn good with 3ds max 2013/14..viewport is too smooth and no lag at all..its much speed than quadro 4000..checked both cards;-)

the bench mark scene city view from cgarchitect -its finished in 14 sec with shaded frame mode in max 2014, 16 sec in realistic mode.....

this same scene took me around 28 sec with quadro 4000 in shaded frame mode...realestic ;-(

 

my big time struggle came to end lol...thanks for some peoples who helped me a lot..

Dimitris Tolios ,Juraj Talcik

 

Edited July 26, 2013 by arjuraj

[sergiocarrillo]

Hi! I'm new in this forum and have a question that i bet has been asked like a billion times: which is the ideal graphics card to use for V-ray? either using sketchup or 3ds max.

 

I also need to make animations with it.

 

I'd really appreciate your answers!

[Dimitris Tolios]

Hi! I'm new in this forum and have a question that i bet has been asked like a billion times: which is the ideal graphics card to use for V-ray? either using sketchup or 3ds max.

 

I also need to make animations with it.

 

I'd really appreciate your answers!

 

Vray doesn't use a GPU per se. Vray is predominantly a CPU based renderer.

 

VRay RT GPU, a progressive rendering engine within the 2.0 and newer versions of VRay for 3DS and Maya, but not Sketchup, use CUDA enabled nVidia GPUs for raytracing images much faster than CPUs can.

OpenCL, the language supported by both AMD and nVidia is supposingly available, but doesn't work well with AMD cards yet, so at this point the best performance/$ available surely comes from mid-to-high end nVidia GTX gaming cards.

 

That's for progressive / GPGPU rendering with VRay RT ONLY. Has no relationship with what Sketchup or 3DS are doing. There is no Vray RT for Sketchup (neither CPU or GPU). Vray for Rhino recently got RT CPU mode only.

 

Sketchup is OpenGL. It would be roughly (from better to worse) Firepro/Quadro cards >> Radeon Cards > GTX cards.

OpenGL is "crippled" @ a driver level for GTX cards. I personally own a GTX Titan and differences in OpenGL viewports from my previous GTX 670 are inexistant in real life. Benchmarks report less than 10% advantage over the 670, which is less than 5% better than the 660...so between a $200 GTX and a $1000 GTX, performance differences in Maya, Solidworks and other demanding 3D CAD apps is embarassing. A 3 yo Quadro 2000 or even a Quadro 600 does better overall. Newer Quadros like the K2000 belong in a different realm of performance. Again, it is just because of the drivers being optimized. No "magic" in hardware level - a K2000 is sharing hardware with 128bit GT Geforce cards with Kepler architecture that cost less than $120.

 

3DS appears to work pretty well with GTX cards in the latest version, but again I would expect much more consistent results with a Firepro/Quadro card than a GTX or Radeon. Both gaming card families - given a powerful $200~300 GPU will perform decently, but nothing impressive.

[paneli]

I bought a new Rig this morning. Finished assembling it a couple of hours ago

Intel 3930K

Asus Sabertooth X79

16GB Cursair Vengence Pro CL11

Samsung SSD 840 Pro 128GB

Asus GTX 780

 

Will test right away with 3Ds Max Design 2014 and Vray 2.40.04 on a fresh windows 7

 

Will edit soon

[paneli]

I bought a new Rig this morning. Finished assembling it a couple of hours ago

Intel 3930K

Asus Sabertooth X79

16GB Cursair Vengence Pro CL11

Samsung SSD 840 Pro 128GB

Asus GTX 780

 

Will test right away with 3Ds Max Design 2014 and Vray 2.40.04 on a fresh windows 7

 

Will edit soon

 

Sorry for double post, but it want this post to be seen.

 

Anyway I compared two very similar rigs.

Rig 1:

Intel 3930K + Corsair h110i hydro cooler

Asus P9X79 Deluxe Motherboard.

32GB G.Skill 1600Mhz Ripjaws CL9

OCZ Vertex 2 120GB SSD

PNY Quadro 4000 2GB

 

Rig 2:

Intel 3930K + Corsair h100i hydro cooler

Asus Sabertooth X79 Motherboard

16GB Corsair Vengence Pro 2133Mhz CL11

Samsung 840 Pro 128GB

Asus GTX 780 3GB Stock

 

Both tested under Windows 7 SP1 X64. Updated to 23.8.13.

All test made with 3ds Max Design 2014.

 

I dropped 420 instance Geospheres into a scene.

Quadro showed a huge slowedown already at around 20M poly.

GTX 780 kept a steady 80fps like nothing.

 

When poped it to 300M poly, rig 1 crashed.

Rig 2 slowed down a bit but Max was actually workable!

 

Screen shots soon.

[AJLynn]

This section is going to be updated soon-ish.

 

Ilya, that Quadro is a few years old now and it's based on the first gen Fermi GPU, which has some issues - basically it's an upgraded Geforce 400 series card. The 780 is much more powerful and should be using less power as well. And with 3DSMax being a Direct3D app, it's not really playing to the strengths of the Quadro card. I think that for this sort of work, the high spec Geforce cards can work out well.

[gabmass]

Hi there,

I am about to finalize my system's hardware choice but I have ran into problem for VGA card.

 

above all, my working field is Architectural Modeling (3Ds Max & Vray Rendering), in the future I plan to move from static scenes to dynamic ones, by having a motionpath set for camera to show all inside and around the models, some sort of animation !

 

my budget for VGA is enough for a 1 GB ddr5 which I can just replace this with 2 SLI VGA of 2 GB ddr3.

so I'm wondering how is the performance of 4 GB ddr3 versus 1 GB ddr5 ?

 

in fact, what does the graphic help me with ? isnt it just for the scene (viewport) !?

[AJLynn]

Okay, so first, you don't get to add the RAM on two cards together. Both have to hold the scene info separately. Second, 1GB is plenty if you're not doing GPU renders (and if you are doing GPU renders that's something we can talk about). Third, SLI is not useful for 3DSMax. I'd say that unless you want a GPU rendering solution you should put your GPU budget into one reasonably good (e.g. midrange Radeon or Geforce) card, unless you plan to create scenes with a lot more polygons than in standard arch vis use.

[gabmass]

Andrew. what is GPU Rendering like? how is it done and do we have it in 3Ds Max and Render Engines (in which)?

 

I need to educate myself about this so I make a better choice just in case in future I may need it or not depending on the variety of works I do with the system !

[AJLynn]

GPU rendering programs are like regular rendering programs such as Vray and mental ray, but GPU rendering engines can run on GPUs. Current versions of Vray and mental ray include GPU engines, and there are purpose-built GPU renderers like Arion.

 

GPU renderers are like Maxwell Render, but run on a GPU which makes them in many cases as fast as (or even faster than) CPU renders, and like Maxwell, in many other cases are impractical.

 

GPU render engines are not like the ones you're used to. They don't run like mental ray and Vray, which first calculate lighting and then render each pixel. GPUs have the ability to simultaneously process a very large number of simple operations, so they are not suited to the type of computation that regular Vray and mental ray run. Instead, GPU renderers work by performing many ray traces in parallel. A ray fired to each pixel on the screen can be calculated many, many times, and each time its quality is improved. You can run the render for as long as you like - at first you will see a very grainy image, like a digital photo taken in low light, and over time it will resolve into a smoother image. How long that takes will depend on the materials and lighting and the size of the render output. It could be minutes or several hours.

 

The algorithm doesn't leave room for user optimizations, so it can be easier to use than mental ray and Vray which have many settings. GPU renderers don't have a lot of buttons and numbers to enter. But the flipside is that you can't really optimize the render engine to the scene. There are a lot more people using CPU renders in production than GPU. Also, GPU renderers are not as good for animation as CPU ones, because you can't run the lighting calculation once, save it and use it for multiple frames - each frame must be calculated completely on its own.

 

If you're in doubt, the answer is probably that you don't need to worry about buying hardware for GPU rendering right now.

[aleksandarcopic]

I have a question.

I have Asus GTX 660TI OC 2GB

i7 3820

16GB DDR3 Ram

SSD 120 Samsung and another 500gb HD.

 

I am looking to improve my machine. And there are 2 things on my mind .

1st Change graphic card. I was thinking about buying ATI FirePro v5900 or Quadro K2000 but while reading posts I saw you praise the GTX 780.

2nd Change my Proc 3820 for 4930k.

 

I need help in choosing one of this options. Criteria is time spent on modeling scenes opposed to waiting for render to come to an end.

 

THX

[Dimitris Tolios]

I have a question.

I have Asus GTX 660TI OC 2GB

i7 3820

16GB DDR3 Ram

SSD 120 Samsung and another 500gb HD.

 

I am looking to improve my machine. And there are 2 things on my mind .

1st Change graphic card. I was thinking about buying ATI FirePro v5900 or Quadro K2000 but while reading posts I saw you praise the GTX 780.

2nd Change my Proc 3820 for 4930k.

 

I need help in choosing one of this options. Criteria is time spent on modeling scenes opposed to waiting for render to come to an end.

 

THX

 

I have a counter-question: are you using Vray RT GPU or Iray? I am gessing not, you are using CPU based Vray or Mental Ray etc, so your GPU is irrelevant to rendering speeds. Always was.

[aleksandarcopic]

I have a counter-question: are you using Vray RT GPU or Iray? I am gessing not, you are using CPU based Vray or Mental Ray etc, so your GPU is irrelevant to rendering speeds. Always was.

 

 

I am using Vray and CPUrendering, only thing i need graphic card is for viewport performance.

[maymoonc]

the only thing I need is viewport acceleration, but I am afraid to end up with millions polygons scenes, will that makes me think of GTX 780 or lower will be enough??

[javiercento]

Hello everyone! I bought a Radeon R9 280X to improve my 3d max viewport performance, but I can't feel progress. I updated the latest drivers but nothing change. Any ideas?

 

My computer hardware:

-i7 4770k

-Mother Asrock/Asus H81M-DGS

-16 gb ram

 

Thanks

[Dimitris Tolios]

Hello everyone! I bought a Radeon R9 280X to improve my 3d max viewport performance, but I can't feel progress. I updated the latest drivers but nothing change. Any ideas?

 

My computer hardware:

-i7 4770k

-Mother Asrock/Asus H81M-DGS

-16 gb ram

 

Thanks

 

 

Improve your 3DS viewport performance over what kind of a video card?

Also, which version of 3DS Max are you using?

[javiercento]

Hi Dimitris, I don't understand your first question. I purchased a Radeon R9 280X and after install it I dont see changes in 3d max (2013) display performance. Even in medium scenes the program move slow, like if the computer doesn't have graphic card.

[Dimitris Tolios]

I wanted to know what was your previous GPU you are comparing it to. The one you've upgraded from. From what I am reading I am guessing you were using the Intel HD IGP the 4770K has built in then?

 

Are you using your viewport in Nitrous mode (default for 2013 I believe)?

If so, try switching to Direct3D. It is slightly faster for complex scenes usually.

 

You can switch back to Nitrous if you want the feedback for lighting your scene, after most of the modeling and camera setting is done.

 

The 2014 Nitrous implementation I believe is vastly improved for use with powerful GTX/R9/79xx cards, but I understand that unless on a Subscription plan, jumping to newer 3DS versions is not an easy thing financially.

[javiercento]

Exactly, I was using the native mother graphic card.

 

Its a good idea, I'm going to try with Direct 3D and in few weeks migrate to 3d max 2014.

 

Thanks for answer .

[padre.ayuso]

So, after all, can someone help me work out if I should get (for VRay 3.0 and only CPU Rendering) a GTX670 or a Firepro W5000? Is it worth going for the Firepro? Or getting a higher GTX one? Mainly for viewport performance, since I'll be getting enough CPU power to render CPU. I'll do no GPU renderings at all.

[RyderSK]

So, after all, can someone help me work out if I should get (for VRay 3.0 and only CPU Rendering) a GTX670 or a Firepro W5000? Is it worth going for the Firepro? Or getting a higher GTX one? Mainly for viewport performance, since I'll be getting enough CPU power to render CPU. I'll do no GPU renderings at all.

 

Than just get GTX 750Ti (Maxwell generation, powerful and low energy). If you plan on playing some games or having fun with real-time engines then GTX 970 (960 is far away, Q1 2015). Confusing name (X+2) but it's the same architecture.