BEST Graphic-Card and Setup for PC for Rhino5 and Rendering

hello everybody,

i like to build a new pc for my work as an architekt( workstation )
and i look for the best GPU for rhino hand hope you guys can help me with the GPU setup
i think the rest of setup is good but if there are ideas to make it better feel free and comment…

the pc main setup is

CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-3930K ( 6 x 3.5 ghz )
MOTHERBOARD: MSI-X79A-GD45 (max 128GB DDR3 RAM )
HARDDRIVE: SSD 250 GB and HDD 1TB
POWERBOX: be quiet Pro 7 80+ gold 550W

GRAPHIC CARD: ??? i dont know … and need help ! here are some ideas for the GPU card

a nvidia quatro FX 5800 (4GB) it cost now about 400euro 3 years ago the highend card cost about 3000euro
or nvidia quatro FX 4800 (1.5GB) , quatro 4000 …
or Geforce GFX 680, GFX690, ( 4GB)
GFX TITAN (6GB) maybe to expensive now

what i do with rhino
complex buildings, parts of hole cities, lot of design stuff, some work with t-splines, mesh
i use the most functions of rhino. complex stuff with grasshopper, diva, ladybug ( suncalculations, sunpath )

I work a lot with V-RAY Render and i rendering a lot, it have to be FAST ! time is money :wink:
work with photoshop CS 6 and other CS& applications, CAD software Vectorworks 2011

i need to work very quick and smooth with all these programs and looking for the best solution

i hope you can share with me your experience
and find with me the best GPU ( and setup )

thanx :slight_smile:

Hi:
It’s impossible for us to recommend a specific graphics card. All of those should work. The key specification is Rhino V5 uses OpenGL 2.0 and Shader 1.2. These are not leading edge, latest specifications. They are fairly old making Rhino work on a wide variety of cards.
Have a look at the details about graphics cards linked to the System Requirements page on the Support page.
One details, VRay and most rendering tools are not effected at all by the display card. The exception are the “real time” rendering tools like Neon. They do benefit from faster graphics cards.
I personal preference is for the Nvidia GTX cards or the AMD FireGL V5900 or V7900 cards.

You’ll need to explore the video card requirements of the other applications you listed yourself. I don’t have any experience with them.

After some tests I bought an used GTX285 2GB for my Dual Xeon workstation. But I changed the GPU fan for lowest noise.

Is your power supply strong enough for your workstation? I suppose so the fan will run at high speed often.

@Micha

if i understand you right i dont need a high end card, i have a great performance with an gtx 295
can work on complex modells, grasshopper applications …
but i have also to work with CS6 and vectorworks very quick.

i think the power is ok, we will see i bought the power case very ceap for 30 euro, be quiet 550w dark power pro p7, if its less i buy a bigger one

@John_Brock what GTX you prefer for a great performance on rhino 5

i hope more people can share with us their experience…

thank you guys

I’m not going to make any specific recommendations that I can’t back up with personal experience. You will have to choose yourself based on the support page details I referenced in my last reply.

You might find other users have specific experience and recommendations with regard to specific cards.

good luck

ok, could you tell me what you prefer private,
you have that experience

All the GTX or whatever cards of a certain generation will be just faster or slower variants of the same thing, it’s just a matter of what you want to spend.

You mean, if I spend more money I get more speed? That’s what I expect as a pro user, but not found at my tests. Here a simple test scene with a bike.

www.simulacrum.de/download/Testmaxspeed.rar

Open the file and do some tests in shaded moded (best advanced display features disabled) and wire frame mode. I’m curious to see a modern card that is much faster than the old GTX285. So far I have seen the power of modern cards isn’t used, the GPU stay at low usage always. My result was:

GTX670 vs. GTX285

shaded
26s vs. 16s

wire frame mode
24s vs. 10s

@michicento: the GTX285 was the last single GPU card with full OpenGL 2 support. I’m not sure, but if I remember me right there was some problems with the double GPU setup of the GTX295 or was my problem that the available memory was quite limited? I don’t know anymore, but at the http://www.holomark.com/ v5 test of G1 (curves) the GTX295 was the winner. So your card is quite good.

(I think the curve test speed is most interesting, since Rhino needs to handle the curves of the NURBS data. Mesh data handling without curves isn’t a problem so much. My bike model test show it - shaded and wireframe mode are a problem for the GTX670, since Rhino isn’t using the full GPU power for the NURBS curves . Best Rhino speed can be reached, if no curves are shown at the display. For me the bike model test shows the speed problem you can get if you are working with complex, detailed NURBS models. There is no solution for this problem yet and that’s the reason why you don’t get a clear answer.
It’s a pain to see the rising power of modern cards and don’t get it usable for complex Rhino models. Maybe at Rhino 6 the problem can be solved.

My results on a GTX680:

-Software OpenGL-

Wireframe: 11.63
Shaded: 58.73
Rendered no shadows: 25.95

-GTX680, no AA-

Wireframe: 7.45
Shaded: 12.67
Shaded UV different colors: 28.94
Rendered + shadows: 20.64
Rendered no shadows: 9.52

-GTX680, AA 8x + MipMap near + Anisotropic high-

Wireframe: 7.50
Shaded: 16.28
Shaded UV different colors: 29.06
Semi transparent: 27.63
Transparent: 15.91
Rendered + shadows: 20.81
Rendered no shadows: 9.63
Artistic: 57.06
Pencil: 57.20

Environment analysis applied: 4.28
Environment analysis applied with all objects selected: 11.30

It would be interesting to see if DirectX instead of OpenGL makes a difference.
I remember such a plugin (was it for V3?).
It had a much better display than with OpenGL.

-C-H-A-R-L-E-S-

Just checking: does this mean you are showing card results while Rhino is set to “Software GL” instead of “Hardware”, or do I misunderstand?

My understanding is that if “software” is selected all the OpenGL work is done by the CPU.