Hi,
I think I need a little bit help, at the moment I made the decision about the reasonable hardwares that fit for my budget and needs. So I am considering between these three entry level hardware, Quadro K600, GTX 660, FirePro V4900, but no idea which one could be better. I want to use Rhino, Moi and Archicad and some small apps for photo editing and no gaming. Any idea?
It all depends on the complexity of the files you work on.
All will work well, but Quadro K600 would be my choice in that scenario.
It has better visual AA quality than the FirePro, and better drivers.
I recommend pro card for pro use as they run a bit cooler, less noisy, and they have more stable drivers.
Hi, thanks your opinion. Basically AA quality not a big issue in my case because most of the time renders are made for the buildings where AA is perfect. The main issue is the viewport speed where smooth rotation and zooming is essential and the problem. Someone on other forum just posted they used K4000 cards but GTX 680 performed faster than the pro one in Studio max, insane.
It is not really insane.
A pro card has focus on fidelity and reliability, a gaming card has focus on speed and eyecandy.
A pro card is built to last and run cool at full speed for a long period of time, while a game card does not have that same focus, again drivers are optimized for speed and not for reliability in CAD environments.
And 3ds max is basically running a directX “game engine”.
One can of course argue that all CAD packages could run on such an engine, but then the developers would have to focus on that instead of choosing a solid OpenGL platform.
Yes, it makes sense, I see.
Finally I found a correct comparison between K600 and V4900
It says V4900’s performance is slightly better than Quadro K600. If you could comment that would be helpful. Unfortunately there is no Rhino’s only one benchmark software is Holomark1 that does not provide too many results. I think Passmark is not reliable in case of pro graphics cards.
Meanwhile I found some benchmark on Microstations
This is quite interesting…
http://appsnet.bentley.com/MstnBenchmark/Reporting/ByVideoCard.aspx
It makes sense that the v4900 is a bit faster, but again, I prefer Quadro due to the better AA. I bought a V7900 but replaced it with a Quadro 4000, because the V7900 had such bad AA quality. IMHO! For anybody not working with curve fidelity I presume it does not matter much!
BTW. Holomark1 is being replaced very soon with Holomark2. I am finetuning it now, it is a much better test.
Ok, I bought the V4900 but it does not work.
I works with moi 3d, and thea studio but freezing at Rhino and Archicad, good card.
I tried Win 7, Win 8 latest driver, oldest one nothing, freezong or blue screen or driver stopped responding,
Yes, you told me, I wanted to try something else. :smile.
Sorry to hear that. The v4900 should not freeze.
Moi uses DirectX and Rhino and Acad uses OpenGL, and AMD has a history of bad OpenGL drivers, but not that bad.
Sounds to me that the card either overheats, has a bad memory chip or doesn’t get enough/stable power.
Hope someone with a more recent experience can help you out.
Good luck!
Hi, yesterday I tested some drivers and finally found a stable one for Win 7, I used the first release from 2011 and did not install any additional apps (comes with the installer) other than the driver itself. Now it seems fine.
Whenever I buy a new computer or upgrade, I just check to see what is the latest nVidia OpenGL card and go with a model that is 1 or 2 steps less expensive than their best. Many 3D professional geeks consider the nVidia line to be the gold standard; the key being 3D professionals. That means they care if the card will run for days / stay cool / look great on screen / update drivers regularly / etc. The new K-series are excellent with their CUDA-GPU co-processors; these can do real-time viewport rendering which is a huge boost to visualize a final render.
The top-of-the-line cards are usually overkill for me, so I recently bought the K4000 which works great on 2x27 in monitors. If I were upgrading an older computer (or making a cheaper workstation) I would have bought the K600.
As Holo wisely advised (several times!) gaming cards are fine, but they’re not what the professionals use. I used to think it didn’t make a difference until I did a test. I opened up a huge file on two identical computers. The gaming card gave me lags and jerks every time I did a zoom / pan / rotate. The OpenGL card was fast and smooth. Case closed.