Graphics card for 3dsMax/Mudbox

dazzyboy10 · 12 Nov 2013 at 14:12

Hey guys,

I am not looking at building a totally dedicated to graphics PC. I am using Autodesk software as in 3DS Max/Mudbox/Maya etc but am looking for a decent graphics card that i can combine for design and gaming. I currently have an EVGA 660ti SC card and was wondering if adding another would be helpful or getting something a little better. I was advised to check out this section rather than in the graphics card section and it was mentioned that maybe a GTX 680 was good!!

MouthBoy · 13 Nov 2013 at 19:27

When I was using Maya in Uni I found that having more RAM was better then a faster GFX. My GTX470 was absolutely fine with Maya, even some stupidly high polygon models. The biggest increase in performance was upgrading from 4gb to 12gb of RAM. Although I can still easily cap this out without trying too hard.

Just some food for thought.

Dup · 13 Nov 2013 at 22:10

It's more CPU/RAM than GPU, you should be fine with that. You'll find most machines struggle with certain complex models and a lot of that is software issues. It might be worth checking you are allowing the software to make the most out of your hardware.

I have 2x 6970 but its my Q9550 and 4GB RAM that holds me back the most.

Mel17 · 29 Nov 2013 at 02:38

My build was created based on using the same software as youve stated plus the need to game. I was advised to focus more on getting a decent CPU and RAM as stated above.
On a recent project working in 3DSMax, the rendering really did make use of the RAM. Even with rotating the model and loading files was much more efficient. What size models are you looking at working with?
Mudbox is a great piece of software although ive not had chance to try it out much on this build.

Rozzy85 · 30 Nov 2013 at 01:47

The latest versions of these software suites have more demanding viewport shaders than what was used before but still little is require of the GFX card, CPU power is far more important. I've ran 3dsmax for 10 years and even way back then my laptop from 2003 with it's horrendous Radeon IGP coped fine.

If you want to go into high poly modelling (100,000+) then it'd be advisable to get something good anyway. My computer is quite old now (Q6600, 5870) and starts to get a bit slow in Mudbox at around the 1,000,000+ mark with complex brushes.

Lareon · 2 Dec 2013 at 16:05

i have a gtx 570 at the moment and that runs my display port really well, it's the ram and cpu as the other guys said. on larger scenes i hit the 32gb limit even with proxies (i do work with very large data sets though)

you can never have enough ram!

lsg1r · 5 Dec 2013 at 11:56

In my opinion - working with 3ds max (don't use maya/mudbox) it really depends on how you want to use the gpu, if you intend to render with iray (ie use the gpu) then you ideally need an Nvidia one with a lot of memory, if you want to render using vray then you can go amd although you need to check compatibility.

The ideal 'gaming' card if you have the budget is the titan (this would be my choice of gpu until we get a replacement) due to it literally being a cut down tesla/quadro card although you can get away with a 780/780ti although this will have some 'cuda' apps which will be slower.

The top of the line 6xx series doesn't perform any better than a 570/580 (I use a 570 2.5gb) in gpu rendering due to the change in architecture and you only start to see improvements with the higher end 780's and titans, then it's such a small improvement it's hardly worth it except for the ram...

But as said, ram (16gb minimum) is just as important as the gpu although I wouldn't say cpu is that important, it's just the better you have the less tim e you wait for any processes to complete, I'd still grab quad core minimum though.

Oh and grab an ssd for the scratch disk/temp files etc