which graphics card for 3d modelling

[alastair84]

Hi my friend wants me to build a computer for him to use with 3d modelling applications.
The programs he wants to use are autodesk maya, viewfive and z brush, amongst a few others.
I went to the autodesk maya website and could only find Quadro FX cards under the "recommended nvidia graphics cards" section.
I would like to know what difference there is between the Quadro FX card and a normal gaming card e.g. like a 4870. (I assume its because the quadro fx range are made for CAD applications......)
But basically i wanted to know if it would make any difference if i put a 4870 card in the machine to a quadro fx card in there to the rendering speed of those gfx applications he wants to use.
The system will have a q6600 chip in it and my friend will only be using one monitor.

 

[amkan13]

their are certain gaming cards you can mod into professional cards like the ati 38** series and the 8800GT. take a look into it, might save you a bit of money instaed of pay the pro prices which are kinda high.

but 4870 vs. fx, the fx would win in terms of CAD and 3D benchmarks like maya.

 

[Ben M]

quadro cards are the same as normal cards, the difference is the bios. you can make an 8800GTX think it's a quadro.

 

[jak731]

You may find this article helpful.

The reviewer says that ordinary graphics cards can perform just as well as professional cards at a lower price.

 

[matthew2456]

the quadro cards are the same physically as the std gfx cards, the difference being they have tweaked/specialised drivers to support hardware rendering in cad packages. If you dont mind losing the warranty you can flash nvidia cards, e.g an 8800gt or gts, to make the machine think its a quadro.

 

[alastair84]

thanks. cool.....
it shows a £200 9800 gtx almost level with a £600 quadro fx 3700 in Maya 2008....
think i'm gonna put in a 4870 then....im sure my friend will also play games too!

 

[thesnowdog1971]

You might find that changing the CPU from a Q6600 to a Q9550 will significantly decrease rendering times. A 12Mb L2 cache will certainly speed things up.

 

[jeggsy]

When using applications like that, it's not just the VGA card that needs to be up to scratch. Choosing the right spec CPU and a descent amount of memory help a great deal. Might even be worth thinking of going 64bit OS to get past the 4Gb memory limit if your using really big models etc.

I look after our CAD/FE workstations at work. They run AutoDesk Inventor, AutoCAD, Mechanical Desktop and Ansys FE packages. They all have various versions of Nvidia Quadros.

Only advice I can say is to look at the CAD applications website and see what cards/drivers they recomend and approve of as this helps a bit for performance and stability.

Like previous posts here have said, the Geforce/Quadro hardware is very similar so I'm led to believe, just tweaked to suit CAD applications rather than games etc and a big price increase for good measure ! !

 

[smilertoo]

Always go for nvidia for 3d apps. Only get ati if you can afford a firegl.

 

[jeggsy]

Yeah... good comment.

I know several years ago the Nvidia cards/drivers used to be head & shoulders quicker when doing OpenGL work.

Don't think OpenGL is used as much these days and ATI has probably caught up with Nvidia on that score.

 

[ACESHIGH]

Always go for nvidia for 3d apps. Only get ati if you can afford a firegl.

Why? As has been pointed out FireGL and Quadro cards are essentially the same as normal cards. ATI OpenGL drivers are much improved over what they were years ago. And the ATI cards offer as good performance if not better (better with the 4800 series cards ) than the Nvidia cards.