Graphic Card for better viewport performance

[remeusromulus]

Hi,

 

I'm new here and i read many threads about hardware, specially graphic cards but i'm still confused. I'm preparing to buy/build a new workstation dedicated to 3D design using 3ds Max. I work essentially on architectural projects (interior and exterior) and many of them has more than 15 millions of polygons.

 

Actually for rendering i'm using a render farm composed of 3 computers i7 2600/8 GO RAM.

 

So the workstation will be used essentially to design the scenes and not to render them. I want to work in comfort when manipulating the project into the viewport beacause actually using my actual machine it lags so much (i have an i7 960, 8 GO RAM, and an old ATI graphic card)

 

For CPU, RAM, HDD and other hardware i don't have problem choosing them. But when it comes to grahpic card... I'm really blocked. Do i have to into gaming graphic cards or professional ones? ATI or NVIDIA?

 

The total budget for workstation is up to 1500$

 

Thanks for your help.

[Dimitris Tolios]

You don't "have to", but for viewport performance Quadro cards do have an edge over top of the line gaming cards...

That's given you do invest some money on them...I tend to think anything below Quadro 4000 won't give you enough viewport performance increase over a top of the line gaming card, and you will be sacrificing a lot CUDA/OpenCL acceleration performance that the gaming cards excel at.

 

Now, a $700 and upwards card (assuming you go for Quadro 4000), is kinda hard to fit in a $1500 budget for a complete tower, yet not impossible.

 

Some reading: http://www.nyc3d.org/3dwp/PortfolioItems/geforce-gtx-580-vs-quadro-5000/