CGarchitect Graphics Card Review Roundup (Viewport Performance Tests)

[Jeff Mottle]

As this seems to be coming up a lot, I thought I would make this a sticky post in the Hardware forum.

 

This is the new defacto review for the most used 3D apps in our industry comparing Consumer vs Professional card performance:

 

http://www.cgarchitect.com/news/Reviews/Review076_1.asp

[bretleon]

thx, for a very usefull test!

I ended up buying the GeForce GTX480 card for 3ds max 2011 use.

However, where do i find the NVDIA Performance Drivers - for the 480 card that is used inn this test?

I checked the Nvida site, but i only found special drivers for the Qudaro cards.

please help.

/B

[AJLynn]

The Max performance drivers are only for Quadros.

[xaoo]

Hi,

 

I just wanted to ask as I am trying to build a good PC for 3d modeling and rendering. I cannot make up my mind which graphics card will be better to buy GeForce GTX460, GTX480, GTX560 or should I go with new Quadro 2000? Quadro 2000 is comparable to FX 1800. Looking at the chart overall performance in 3d Studio of FX 1800 is a bit better than GTX480. In that case will Quadro 2000 be a good choice for 3dsmax and vray?

 

Regards,

 

xaoo

[DAssassin]

I am also in search of a good system for rendering using Vray. Old system having Quad core 9400,4gb ddr3 ram,ati 4870 is really slow on rendering with vray. Dont have a clue why its so slow! Any advice or suggestions would be helpful. Thanks.

[AJLynn]

Well, first, Vray rendering is only affected by the video card when using the Vray RT GPU module - regular Vray doesn't utilize the video card. So if you are using Vray RT GPU, one way to speed it up right now would be to up the video card to a Geforce 580 3GB (not 590 but 580). If you're not, the 4870 is probably still adequate for most uses so if you're looking for a hardware upgrade I'd do motherboard, CPU and RAM in one go (for example, this, this and this as a set, or this, this and this) assuming you have a normal ATX case.

[DAssassin]

Thanks for your reply. Hope to get a new one assembled soon, maybe by this week.

[AJLynn]

The 560 series is very good. I'm not up on whether the ones you buy for PCs can be used on MacOS - that's something to ask on discussions.apple.com. Assuming the answer is yes, if you use CUDA, get a 2GB version, like this: http://ncix.com/products/?sku=61199 or (better) this: http://ncix.com/products/?sku=64191 but if you don't, a 1GB version of the 560 ti like the one you linked to should be fine.

[AJLynn]

There's only the 560 and the 560 TI - the "fermi" in the name just refers to the entire line of new-ish nVidia cards. The TI is a bit more powerful card - same basic GPU but with more of the processing units turned on (384 vs. 336) and slightly faster GPU clock at base speed (822MHz vs. 810). It's not an enormous difference in clock speed but with the extra processing units the TI should be about a 15% improvement over the regular.