Graphics Card Conspiracy Theory

[joseph alexander]

I'm running a p4 3.0 with a geforce fx9500 and two monitors at 1200x1600. With a 1.2 million polygon model Rhino runs open GL seamlessly, but in MAX, the same model is a slide show when navigating.

Is there a driver that i can use with this gaming card that will allow max to run smoothly. My friends seem to think that NVIDIA and Discreet are in cahoots to make me buy a $700 "CAD" card (like a Quadro). Specifically because NVIDIA purposely cripples their driver when running MAX.

Then again it could be me running the wrong driver for MAX.

Any advice would be great.

 

-Joe

[plastic]

it's not a conspiracy...it's capitalism.

[joseph alexander]

what's the deal with dual cards? you can't distribute the load of one program between two cards.. right?

It seems like the

it seems like the ati fire gl v3200 is the price point card right now, which will probably mimic my geforce fx9500 in performance but run with the correct driver in MAX.

 

Comparison:

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040816/opengl-pcie-16.html

 

Price:

http://www.newegg.com/app/SearchProductResult.asp?DEPA=0

[joseph alexander]

benchmark test with maxtreme drivers

 

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=195394&highlight=graphics+cards

 

actually, the fx500 seems to the best card for the $.

 

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=14-133-082&depa=0

[mbr]

From my experience, Max just dies beyond a certain poly count. Nothing you can do about. There are several different cards in this office, from Geforce to FX 3000s. No one has seen a really noticable difference for arch viz.

 

Unless someone can show me differently, I think it's a waste of money to spend a lot. This may be different for something like character animation, but I don't know about that.

 

I do know FormZ is butter smooth with similar sized scenes, even with old cards.

 

Can anyone comment on other apps? Like Softimage, Maya, or Cinema? With max costing so much, it crosses my mind about switching all the time.

[Chad Warner]

Unless someone can show me differently, I think it's a waste of money to spend a lot.

I agree. When I was working at the school here several years ago, we got a bunch of high end intergraph workstations with $5000 graphic cards. (for a discounted price). Opened up Viz and loaded a model and it was like..

Got almost the same performance out of $500 dollar models.

[joseph alexander]

It's all about the drivers. What I've found out is that with Max is that EVERY card is worthless without the propper drivers installed (maxtreme, etc). Max only makes drivers for "workstation" cards: quadro, fire, etc, while the same priced gaming cards are actually much more powerful.

[Richard McCarthy]

Joseph,

what API are you running at the moment for MAX?

OpenGL or Direct 3D or software mode?

 

Because, I found that for me (I am using GeForce 4 4200, still best card for DX8 class), when I use OpenGL in MAX, the screen JERKS every few second when I am panning/rotating perspective viewports. It gets worst when I have large model. I then switch to Direct 3D 9.0 API (inside MAX) and some how, when you try to rotate the view ports or panning, initially it will be slow for 5 second, then it's silky smooth all the way. It seems DX9 caches the geometry and hence the initial lag, but after that it's pretty smooth.

 

Give that a try.

 

Also for MAX Extreme driver, unless you have access to it, I can suggest you could "MOD" your nvidia game card to pro card with some utility programs. Search Guru3D.com.

[plastic]

a quadro 900 card or better makes a huge difference with max, especially for big architectual models. it's mainly the maxtreme driver.

some managed to hack a geforce card to a pseudo quadro, which seems to give almost the same results.

but a plain gaming card will always suck with max, even the new geforce6 ones.

personally i feel unable to work with a geforce card. everything's so sluggish and laggy.

[ShaunDon]

Yeah, I gotta say I was dissin' the Wildcats for awhile. We have a dual Xeon machine in the office pimped out with one of those $2k cards, but it's always behaved horribly. Then I rebuilt the system myself and took the time to get the correct Max HEIDI drivers and everything for it -- apparently our previous IT guy didn't know jack about that -- and the thing works amazingly now. I opened a scene I modeled of a 43-story multi-use tower in Dubai that I modeled this summer and it screamed.

 

Well, it refreshed at maybe 3-5 frames a second... but that's totally usable compared to the 1-2 second per frame time I was getting on the ATI Radeon 9800 in my workstation.

 

Now I'm just jealous. ;-)

 

Shaun

[Chris Johnson]

I bought a Geforce 6800 a few month's ago, and was using just vanilla OpenGL drivers. Well I was getting piss poor performance in Max. I mean it was dogging me at 68,000 polys. I even benchmarked it against my rendering node which has a Geforce2 video card; my 6800GT was slower.

 

Dec 29 2004: Unwinder released Rivatuner 15.3 at http://www.guru3d.com and I turned my 6800 into a Quadro 4000 with two clicks of a mouse and a reboot. I installed the Maxstreme drivers for Max6 into my Max7 installation, and WOW! The difference was simply amazing. Only thing is I have to turn selection bracketing off when I select an object in the viewport. I benchmarked my system before and after and I got around 100% performance increase.

 

Chris J.

[smeggy]

With most cards (gaming variety) I've found that max runs better in direct 3d than OGL. Not as accurate but faster in general.

[joseph alexander]

well I ordered an fx 500 card. We'll see how it works. I really think that the drivers make the difference.

The thing that amazes me is that Rhino must be making use of my video game card because I have a 1.5 million polygon model and it's refreshing at 3 frames per second. while 3d studio is around 10 seconds per frame. I noticed that when I navigate in rhino, it hides 80 percent of the model when I'm rotatating which i thought was pretty cool.

 

-joe

[joseph alexander]

Got the quadro fx500 card. Rhino navigates slightly slower the with this card (compared to the 5900) and max, with the same polygon model navigates just as fast as rhino. so my conspiracy theory has proven to be true so far. The two major graphics card companies disable their gaming cards via software plugins so users have to spend more to buy a CAD card, this applies only to max. This really frustrates me because the most powerful cards are the gaming cards.. faster chipsets ram etc... but they're disabled for max.

By the way I'd recommend the fx500, very cheap.. very good. It didn't look impressive next to my massive 5900 but gave the same results in rhino, and brought max from 10 seconds per a frame to 3 frames per a second (30x increase) with the maxtreme drivers..... not bad for less then $250...

 

 

-joe

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Got the quadro fx500 card. Rhino navigates slightly slower the with this card (compared to the 5900) and max, with the same polygon model navigates just as fast as rhino. so my conspiracy theory has proven to be true so far. The two major graphics card companies disable their gaming cards via software plugins so users have to spend more to buy a CAD card, this applies only to max. This really frustrates me because the most powerful cards are the gaming cards.. faster chipsets ram etc... but they're disabled for max.

By the way I'd recommend the fx500, very cheap.. very good. It didn't look impressive next to my massive 5900 but gave the same results in rhino, and brought max from 10 seconds per a frame to 3 frames per a second (30x increase) with the maxtreme drivers..... not bad for less then $250...

 

 

-joe

 

i have been dissapointed in every ATI card i have tried inthe past. i was considering and fx500, but can't get past my previous experience with ATI. i was told by someone that part of my dissopiontment was probably because ATI does not keep as tight of control of the production of their cards as nVidia does. i don't know whether there is any truth to this, but based on my experience, i would say that there is something there.