Workstation or Gaming GFX Card?

[DavidDcSnk]

Hi Guys

I'm searching for abit of advice. I'm building a new pc and was wondering if I should go for a workstation card, such as the FireGL or for a 'gaming' card. I will be using the machintoe for Maya/Max 3d work and animation, along with game programming. I never play games on my pc's, plus i have a limted budget to play with of around £100. I have seen a FireGL 3350 for £90, so my main question would be which would give me better performance, this, or a equiv priced mainstream card such as the Ati HD 3850.

Any adivce or suggestions would be most welcome

Regards

David

[Knot3D]

With Maya & Max, keep them away from a Ati card...

Maya & Radeon/FireGL is known to have small to big problems with anything
brush related in Maya and also the red frame indicator in your animation graph will not show up.

I've got one answer for you : get Nvidia Quadro FX. Best & safest Maya/Max certified hardware.

[Buenamos]

I guess I don't really understand the point behind the workstation cards...Maya and max are really cpu dependent if anything, right? I do a lot of work in Maya, 3ds max, Zbrush, video editing in Avid and they all work fine on both my cards. (8600m gt in laptop and 8800gt in desktop)

[SH64]

I guess I don't really understand the point behind the workstation cards...Maya and max are really cpu dependent if anything, right? I do a lot of work in Maya, 3ds max, Zbrush, video editing in Avid and they all work fine on both my cards. (8600m gt in laptop and 8800gt in desktop)
So in other words you believe those quadros are total waste in rendering programs ?
did you try making a comparsion between a gaming card vs. rendering one on same system setup ? that might clear things up.

[jolle]

The cards primary task is viewport rendering, not offloading the "real" rendering process. Viewport rendering differs a bit from how graphic cards work in games.
That said I havent really had any problems using a "Geforce" in Maya, Max, Motionbuilder, Zbrush, Mudbox or Fusion.. and my old 6800GT didnt really show much difference in viewport performance (that I noticed, didnt compare FPS or anything) compared to the Quado FX4000 in school

Anyhow, there are renderers that can use GPU to offload some tasks, Gelato is prolly the biggest on that front, and MentalRay has some features but im really unsure of how much that acctually helps, think its just some shadow acceleration via OpenGL or somesuch, cant find any benchmarks on that, which is wierd if it acctually made a difference, you´d think some would have tested it..
But Im fairly sure my computer (X2 3800+ and 6800GT at the time) was rendering faster then the school computers (Pentium D 2.8Ghz Quadro FX4000), using MentalRay in Maya 8, 8.5 and 2008..

That said I think we´re really close to getting GPU renderers, or atleast heavily assisted by GPU via GPGPU, using for example nvidias CUDA framework.
A 8800GTX would be assisting with 128x 1.5Ghz SP units, and with graphics and rendering being a fairly paralell thing, that might show significant improvement over current multicore CPUs (or so I would speculate, dunno how 1 cycle of a SP unit would compare to 1 cycle of a full CPU core, in this type of task, but for things like raytracing it SEEMS like a great improvement doing 128 rays simultaniously at that speed)

Wouldnt be suprised if NV bought Mental Images to implement GPU rendering via CUDA in MentalRay.

[LilSoapyShimpty]

Viewport rendering uses OpenGL Quadro workstation cards have 5x the OpenGL performance of GeForce.

I know I have been testing in Cinebench with a FX4600 and 8800GTX GTX had to have an OCed front side bus to 1700mhz to get 5200 point score FX4600 scored this stock with no OCing.

However you won't be able to visual tell the difference unless you run majorly large polyginal models and so over 30,000 plus.

DX10 performance is the same.

[LilSoapyShimpty]

The bueaty of Quadro to me is it has a support structure designed around the pro industry and its quality control is much higher than GF multiple BP's and so on.

Drivers are written for what I do and since i do animation for a living its all about up time you know. If I have to spend 1 week trying to solve a problem because Autodesk doesn't know anything about my GF card because their are 100's of them or EVGA doesn't know anything about Maya because they deal with gaming thats a big deal. Call PNY and NVIDIA they know all about pro software such as Maya and Autodesk can easily diagnose Quadro due to certification.

Quadro is all about maximum up time and a support infastructure for professionals who lost lots of money every day they have down systems.

If your a hobbiest and you don't do the work for money go with GeForce. If not and you do it for a living don't trip over pennys to pick up dollars youll later lose if you have to diagnose a problem.

Also Quadro has optimized drivers for pro software.

just my 2 cents

[LilSoapyShimpty]

Also final rendering is CPU centric does not use the GPU unless you are using a different renderer such as Gelato from NVIDIA that uses GPU and CPU. But, all build in renderers are CPU performance based.

SO if you compare two machines at rendering the GPU won't make a difference with any render engines built into maya or 3ds max.