Graphics card power

[il Conte]

Guys,

My brother has asked me to build a pc for him, he'll be doing a lot of autocad and 3ds studio max.

I was just wondering whether the graphics card would make a lot of difference to the performance of either of these applications, or whether they depend more on the power of the processor.

Thanks

 

[allllec]

Well a card with good 2d power would be nice but to be honest i'd say make sure you invest heavly in a good fast cpu then just leave the budget to decide on a graphics card. imo anyway

 

[il Conte]

thanks mate

 

[thefishdude]

yeah dont think you going to need major gfx power. as guy above sais good cpu performance and a god 2gb of ram or 4 if using vista especially if he usuing really large files

 

[ergonomics]

i use 3ds max exclusively for 3d asset creation, i can say going from an x800 > 8800 gts made little/no difference

going from a SD 3700 > C2D 6600 > C2Q 6600 made the difference

 

[Quixote]

Max and other 3D apps benefit from a decent mid range card but don't generally need more. They also tend to run better on a good older card ie 7900gt vs 8800 series because the drivers take a while to stabalise for apps with such a small user base.
It does depend what you're doing though. If it's hardcore modelling, wanting to display loads of triangles, a more powerful graphics card can help. But with say character animation with lots of deformers, constraints, IK calculations etc, they're mostly going to the CPU anyway. So in general as ergonomics says, money is better spent on CPU power for these apps.
I'd say one of those cheap X1950 pros or a 7900gs would be ideal. If he's likely to game at all they are decent enough at that too.
Finally, in case you didn't know, when rendering these 3D programs generally scale very very well with multiple cores. So a cheap quad core is well worth considering if he's doing a lot of intensive rendering.

 

[il Conte]

ergonomics, quixote thanks for your responses... much appreciated.

 

[KillBoY_UK]

for 3d max work i say a good load of ram like 2gb + a midrange card like a x1950 or 8600GTS/cheap 8800gts 320mb would be handy for realtime views when u have lots of pollys on screen , but over a good Cpu makes a differnce in all areas go for a high c2d or a quad , but make sure hes using max 8 or higher , 7 never seemed to a 2nd core for me