LukeC

I was just wondering, in reguards to viz, what is a suitable videocard to use for large scale projects. I've started working in large high poly count scenes and I'm starting to find that working with these files are starting to get slower and slower. I have been using the adaptive degredation feature to make life a bit smoother but I thought I would do some research into videocards and why they would be suitable. Budget at this point isnt an issue, im researching.

Any help would be great.
Cheers

Lightning

If budget is not an issue you can easily go for the most expensive and powerfull card which is the new Nvidia Quadro FX4000/4400 (~2500$).
From that you can always go down in price and performance.
The is the FX1000 which is around a 1000$ but gives a good value and I read that the new ATI FireGL's give also a good punch for the buck for less than 1000$.

virses

Nvidia RIVA tnt 256 or Oxygen would be good for lesser budgets

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lxgrunger

Buy the quadro fx 1100 if you have agp or fx 1300 if you have pci express. They cost about ~650 dollars.

LukeC

As I said, price isnt an issue (well not yet, it has to be a justifyed price if its going to be expensive). Im just trying to find out what card would be good and why (in relation to working primarily in viz).

A few more questions:

1. How much, in reguards to rendering, is done on the videocard and how much cpu is involved (and ram etc..). I mean obviously the faster the cpu and the more ram the better yes, but in buying a new videocard, how much difference is it going to make on rendering.

2. Is a good videocard going to increase the speed of refreshing a model in the workspace. For example, when working with massive poly count models, working with the model starts to get a bit chuggy and slow to use. Will this be improved?

I partiall have an idea of the answers for these but i thought id ask anyway.

I also should note the system im currently useing a P4 3ghz with 1gig ddr 400 (possibly 2 in the future) and a Quadro FX 500.

I also dont have support for PCI Express

Lightning

1. The videocard would have a marginal affect on the rendering time in comparison to the CPU in the first place and the amount of RAM.
2. The workspace has everything to do with the videocard in combination of the amount of RAM. Regarding that adding more RAM is relatively cheap, the bottleneck is the videocard. I'm not working with very large scenes in 3DSmax but I work with other application that are very OpenGL demanding and I can easily see the difference in handling complex models with a better card and its amount of memory.

Owning an FX500 you should have some sense about the capabilities of the Quadro although it is the entry level of it. Do you use OpenGL in your workspace? I would recommend trying Maxtreme from Nvidia, and with a newer card DirectX9 seems to work as well.