What's up with my new video card?

[Tim Saunders]

I just got a new computer. In theory, it should be tearing my old computer apart.

 

Rendering, there's no question, the new one is light years beyond the old one. It is simply working, panning, zooming, and orbiting in 3ds max I am disseminated. Could it be a display driver setting? I have tried all the settings, and it never orbits any faster. My old one worked around in Max much faster.

 

Old system - XP64bit, 8bg ram, Quadro FX 3400 (from 2006) Processor-q6600

New system - Win7 64bit, 24gb ram, GeForce GTX 285 (new) Processor-xeon e5520

 

Any ideas? Any help would be great.

 

P.S. I also made sure I had the latest driver for my video card.

[alexthg]

Do you experience massive slowdown in wireframe mode?

 

I have Geforce GTS 250 (nvidia driver 197.45, win 7-64bit, max 2010 64bit, direct3d), got really poor performance in Wireframe mode. Shaded mode is a lot faster though. Switching to OpenGL helps a bit, with better performance in wireframe, but not so good in shaded.

[Matt McDonald]

Are you using the same version of Max?

[Tim Saunders]

Thanks for the reply. I'm a little bothered by this.

Do you experience massive slowdown in wireframe mode?

I experience the slow-down in both shaded and wireframe. I have tried open GL and direct 3d, and all the different options in them.

 

Are you using the same version of Max?

Good question. No. I had Max Design 2010 on the previous workstation, and 2011 on the new one. I sure hope that isn't the issue.

 

Is the Quadro FX really that much better of a card than the GTX? I wouldn't have thought so, since my GTX is like years newer, and 4 times more dedicated ram.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Interesting.

 

I didn't have the same card in the same systems, but my GTX260 recently smoked a friends QuadroFX 4500. It was posting both benchmarks and wire frame animation plays through at twice the speed of the 4500.

 

Neither of these were new cards, but ever since that point I have been a little blah on continuing to use the Quadro cards, and only sticking with them because our computer lease supplier insists that the GTX can not be considered a professional card.

 

I don't do a lot of 3d production work with the GTX card though. I was just running my tests, and was impressed with how it handled compared to the Quadro card.

Edited April 20, 2010 by Crazy Homeless Guy

[Matt McDonald]

In Max anyways, the benefit of the Quadros is in the performance driver and to some degree I find that a little dubious. A couple of years back we soft-modded an 8800 GT to its Quadro equivalent and benched both setups using specAPC. On some tests the Geforce was faster and on others the Quadro was faster. It certainly led me to the conclusion that there was no real reason to spend way more money on a Quadro (which is essntially last year's GeForce with a better driver) and a current GeForce.

 

I would think that your GTX 285 would be much faster than the older Quadro. But that's why I asked about the Max version. We just switched from 2009 to 2010 and people have complained about the viewports being sluggish. There might be a few settings in your old install that didn't make it to the new one.

 

As for the OpenGL thing. I've read over at CG Talk that Autodesk hasn't touched Open GL in Max since something like Max 8. Direct 3D is the way to go.

[Tim Saunders]

Thanks for the replies. I'm thinking it must be the version of max. This is probably the least of my gripes about Max 2011, but that is for another thread (or about 20 other threads).

 

That does frustrate me though. I wish Autodesk would spend more effort into making the program perform better, rather than making it look better, and adding more interface changes.