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1GB VRAM for 3D Rendering?

Skeeter

Skeeter

Skeeter

Caporegime
Joined
8 Mar 2007
Posts
37,146
Location
Surrey
Hi

A mate of mine is after some help speccing up a new PC for 3D rendering and design etc. He wants to run 2x 22" monitors, dual or quad core, 4GB RAM and Vista 64bit. Is it worth him going for a graphics card with 1GB of VRAM, or is this still pointless for rendering (as it is with gaming) and should he stick to 512MB which has a lot more options?

Cheers
 
Uni or work makes a big diff tbh.

cpu renders, gfx card helps with viewports. Afaik?

or do the quadros/firegl do opengl rendering?


for uni pc in sig is ample, although Ive been rendering for 13 days 24/7 :)
 
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GFX doesn't help with rendering, he should go with 8GB ram aswell as it's so cheap nowadays. High-end consumer videocards like the 8800's showed up as strong competitors when benchmarked against similar specialist openGL cards that cost a lot more. If he can, and he has the money, he should try and go with a dual quad processor setup with the money saved from buying an 8800 or something.
 
Cheers for the responses guys. Its Uni, not work, so doesnt need a Quadro or dual proccessor.

Ill rephrase the question:

"my mate want to build a PC for his Uni rendering, aswell as to do everything else a PC has to do for a good few years to come. Hes thinking dual or quad core, 4GB RAM, Vista 64, etc. Is it worth him getting a 1GB 8800GT for the extra VRAM or is this overkill and hed be better off with a faster yet lower RAM 8800GTS?"

8GB is planned for a future upgrade aswell, DDR2 seems to have a fair few years left in it yet.
 
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if its gonna be used for gaming get the best he can :) gtx/ gt. gfx cards really dont do much to be fair, and dx10 mode in 3dmax 2008 fails at life.

Quaddie with 4gb of ram is fine (mines yet to use over 85%), unless hes using zbrush (and getting HIGH poly counts, ie 7million) he'll need 6/8gb.

what course he doing, what software will he be using?
 
I had the same question . Why do people shell those amounts of money even on a professional level for specialized cards when all the rendering is done by the CPU and you could spend that money getting a faster CPU, more RAM or even another system to help rendering in network mode , since i know there are some programs that you can assign the rendering to several PC's.
From what i understand the videocards are used to display various lines when you are actually creating, editing the 3D models in the program which seem to me not that GPU demanding.
Anyone care to shed some light?
 
theforce said:
I had the same question . Why do people shell those amounts of money even on a professional level for specialized cards when all the rendering is done by the CPU and you could spend that money getting a faster CPU, more RAM or even another system to help rendering in network mode , since i know there are some programs that you can assign the rendering to several PC's.
From what i understand the videocards are used to display various lines when you are actually creating, editing the 3D models in the program which seem to me not that GPU demanding.
Anyone care to shed some light?
Click to expand...

The viewports in any 3d software take up masses of GPU power, and trust me, when you're working on a model or anything in 3d you need the FPS to stay above 25 or working on it becomes extremely difficult and slows down production time a lot, which is why professionals shell out so much cash on high end card. The easier they can work on a project the quicker they can finish it. Still, there is a cut off point, no GPU can handle a scene with millions of polygons and thousands of objects, so an 8800 should do you fine in comparison to what else is on offer. CPU is massively important obviously for the rendering side of things, I couldn't manage without a quad; I become frequently impatient with the render times I face with it, so if you can(and it's not massively expensive) try for a dual quad setup.
 
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theforce said:
I had the same question . Why do people shell those amounts of money even on a professional level for specialized cards when all the rendering is done by the CPU and you could spend that money getting a faster CPU, more RAM or even another system to help rendering in network mode , since i know there are some programs that you can assign the rendering to several PC's.
From what i understand the videocards are used to display various lines when you are actually creating, editing the 3D models in the program which seem to me not that GPU demanding.
Anyone care to shed some light?
Click to expand...

You can actually render with a GPU, I've been looking into it for a short while, it's difficult to find info for it, but there's some software called RTSquare (link). There's an evaluation on that page for a 3DSmax Plugin. I'm going to try it out tomorrow some time. It's apparantly many times faster than using the CPU to render.

Also, the need for fast graphics cards is when you're making something with a very high polygon count, displacement mapping, or just a complex scene, the graphics card still has to render all this in real time, it's also nice to have some AA on in the 3D View ports. I can't stand using 3Ds Max (and sketchup) without AA enabled.
 
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I bet it has limitations though, enough to stop it from being a viable solution or improvement on CPU rendering. The whole reason why you can't render with a GPU is because the rendering calculations are designed for CPU architecture or something aren't they? Oh and Nvidia's gelato renderer supports GPU rendering, so maybe i'm wrong.
 
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Well, the major limiting factor in this is the £1000ish budget that included dual 22" TFTs. Quad CPU with an 8800 his best bet?
 
Hes been using dual screens for a while, so has gotten used to it. Personally id go for 2 screens aswell, but i suppose its all personal preference.
 
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