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Graphics Card for 3D Rendering

Flor

Flor

Flor

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Joined
28 Mar 2009
Posts
5
Looking at upgrading my current graphics card; Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4670 512MB GDDR3 TV-Out/DVI/HDMI (PCI-Express) to something that is a bit better for 3D rendering.

Also going to be used for psd and gaming.

Got around 150 pounds to spend so would appreciate hearing the thoughts/recommendations from anyone.

thanks

Flor
 
a better graphics card will not decrease render times, it will give you an FPS boost in the viewport. to decrease render times you need a faster cpu!
 
It depends on the renderer if a better graphics card will help. Some renderers now render(real-time) using the GPU, one even uses a combination of GPU+CPU (Arion)
 
Samione is right.
There are GPU accelerated renderers but not a single one which is fully mature & in widespread professional use.
Final render, Vray, Maxwell, Renderman etc I can't think of any popular mainstream render engines that are GPU accelerated yet.
High end graphics cards are only really useful to very high poly modellers at the moment.
If you do rendering CPU is the bottleneck but also, if you do a lot of character animation, then mostly the CPU is still the bottleneck. Because what mostly slows that down is skinning calculations, deformation calculations, scripts ect and this is all still on CPU & frequently still on 1 core of the CPU.
I would try & get a card with a reasonable amount of video RAM say 512mb + in case it's used for viewport texture storage.
I'd also get a mid to high end gaming card over an aging entry level pro card every day of the week. they typically thrash them.
For gaming you could obviously get a big upgrade for a decent price, there are better people to advise on that than me. I really wouldn't expect miracles for 3D, your current card is plenty.
 
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