3ds Max - CPU/Video Card Help

[anexoedanexo]

Hi I'm new here, I couldn't find and answer to my question so here it is. To whoever answers, thank you very much in advance because I don't know who will be able to help me. I have 3ds Max 2009 (not planning on upgrading anytime soon considering the costs) but I am planning on upgrading my PC however.

 

The question is: regarding the newer CPUs and video cards which I plan on purchasing, will I be able to use their full potential with 3ds Max? What I mean is, do I have to configure anything in 3ds Max for them to decrease my render times for exmaple, as well as increase overall performance? If so, what and how? Also, I heard that the video card specifically can be used to decrease render times. Do I have to configure that? If so, how? I would hate to upgrade my PC system without taking full advantage of it! Cheers!

 

FYI: I use mental ray... but I can use Vray if that's necessary.

 

If you can help me but aren't sure because of my older version of 3ds Max, still reply please, any help is appreciated!

Edited September 20, 2015 by anexoedanexo

[tonybishop]

what kind of money are you willing to spend on a VGA card there are a lot out there you can spend anywhere from a 80 USD for a beginner's one like the AMD firepro v3500 which i have i went for it because that is all that i can afford, or you can go for something like the AMD FirePro W7000 graphics card but that is more expensive 809.26 USD

 

 

i would look for the autodesk Certified Hardware these are recommended by autodesk the only problem is i could not find the one just dealing with VGA cards

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/syscert?id=18844534&siteID=123112

 

 

opps i did not see you can change the dot from computer to graphics card, my bad sorry

Edited September 20, 2015 by tonybishop

[Peter M. Gruhn]

If you buy a recent nVidia based card with cool stuff like DirectX Tesselation, I don't know that you will be able to take advantage of that, unless the shader system that I think is more oriented towards game assets (ShaderFX?) supports it in the viewport. But that's something of a niche issue. Your larger question is about rendering.

 

Typical case: The video card is for displaying the viewports while you work and not for rendering.

 

Special case: There are some renderers now that can use the GPU to do their calculations. Typically these renderers have some kind of limitations but they are constantly being updated to include new features and the amount of RAM on video cards is being increased to accomodate more complex scenes and bigger textures. 3ds Max comes with iRay which uses the GPU. VRay comes with... something, I think. Arion would use whatever processing power, CPU, GPU, farm... it could find, but that's been a pretty quiet product right now. Corona is the new shizz and it doesn't bother with the GPU. The general noise has been "oh wow, we're going to have wicked fast renders with 600 core GPUs and check out this awesome demo!" And then one has started hearing "On real scenes... they aren't noticably better." It's up to you to research that more deeply.

 

Your case: You are using mr, so the graphics card is not relevant to rendering.

 

Ah yes, you are on Max 2009. So as usual with computers, your new gear should be backward compatible with Max, but Max won't be forward feature rich... how could they program for something that didn't exist. At some point there will be issues but at least you're on a Windows box so "at some point" isn't "every six months" ;-). Without checking the details, I suspect your Max is 32-bit and your new machine will be a nice 64-bit box with SSD and all the glitter. 32-bit max should work fine but I don't know what happens when it tries talking to 64-bit drivers for the video card. I wonder if you'd have to revert Max to software viewport drivers. We've a couple boffins in here, somebody might know.