What is the best nvidia graphic card used for 3d max ?

[deantherocker]

What is the best nvidia graphic card used for 3 d max, for cad rendering? Any ideas, guys? This g/c is used with dual processor opteron machine by the way.

[Harry72]

http://www.nvidia.com/page/quadroplex.html

Won Xlotto... you'll need it!

[chrise]

What is the best nvidia graphic card used for 3 d max, for cad rendering? Any ideas, guys? This g/c is used with dual processor opteron machine by the way.


Most of the graphics programs like 3D studio max dont use as such the vid card to render the images, this is all done by the CPU and RAM, (the more RAM the better) but in saying that if you want a top of he line general purpose nvidia card to do 3d max look at the 7900 series or the 8800 series or wait a few more weeks/month for the release of their new range. My step son is right into this stuff big time as well and has V9 3d studio max (plus a dozen other graphics programs) and he is using the Raedon X1950 512mb memory pro series card at the moment for what he is doing. If you dont want to use the computer for general purpose stuff as well like gaming etc and its just for graphics applications look at the various diff brands of "workstation" only cards
http://www.nvidia.com/page/workstation.html
http://www.nvidia.com/page/quadrofx.html

You can also look at brands like ELSA FIREGL series low end of about $800 upwards to $1500.00+

A good link is here about workstation vid cards
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/06/16/opengl_workstation_graphics/

Just out of curiosity what monitor are you using in your setup?


Hope this helps

Chris

[Tubby2]

A good card that will easily perform everything you ask of it for the time being would be something like a 8600GTs for under $300

check out the cheapest prices here

http://www.staticice.com.au/cgi-bin/search.cgi?q=8600gts

If you want knock you socks off stuff try the 8800ultra at over $1000

[Harry72]

They are gaming cards, not designed for CAD work(they'll still work tho)typically a workstations GPU card should crank much higher res and handle openGL properly and be super stable.

[Ianab]

Like they guys have said, CAD programs usually render to file, not to screen in real time. The top end graphics cards are designed for gaming where the images are rendered to screen in real time, completely different tasks.

So just get a good middle of the road card, that will draw up the screen previews and handle the general CAD functions fine. CAD doesn't use the multiple pipelines, texture shaders and lighting effects that the new game cards can generate.

Cheers

Ian