about graphic cards...

[dvornik]

Originally posted by diavoletto__
i searched the forums here and there but i found only vague infos.
Yeah right...

There's no "excellent" card for max if you ask me. Quadros are almost as good as their Geforce equivalents for games.

[3Dfx_Sage]

if you want "excellent" for games then wait a few months for NV40. Otherwise get a Radeon, but that's going to suck in max so it's a non-option.

[diavoletto__]

okay okay, forget about the word "excellent":)
actually, i play games a lot but my work on max involves mainly architectural visualisation and walktroughts plus industrial design modeling (lots and lots of polygons) so maybe this info might refine my options.

[3Dfx_Sage]

mmm play games a lot huh.... what kind of games? ie do you like to play the new flashy games or are you still playing Quake3, UT2k3?

[diavoletto__]

games? well, NFS underground, c&c, prince of persia among others :)

[elvis]

For games and Max, i'd be looking at an Nvidia QuadroFX 1000 or 1100.

If that's too much for your budget, the GeForceFX 5700 Ultra would be second choice.

[diavoletto__]

For games and Max, i'd be looking at an Nvidia QuadroFX 1000 or 1100

Thanks elvis
one more question, if i go for a Quadro FX 2000 or 3000, would it be better for my queries or would i be just throwing money away without any noticable improvement?

[dvornik]

Yes

[dvornik]

I mean yes you would be throwing money away.

[elvis]

It really depends on what kind of work you do. I run the IT department for a network full of architects who design extremely large buildings, sporting venues, convention centres, etc. We always get higher-end cards like Quadro 3000's simply because the amount of visual information the guys need on screen at any one time is pretty massive. For these guys, it's money well spent.

On the other hand if you were a low-poly character animator/rigger, then yes you'd be throwig your money away.

Horses for courses. I'd probably agree with dvornik when it comes to a good 3/4 of the Max users I've met and seen the work of, but there is that other quarter that need all the grunt they can get.

[diavoletto__]

thanks guys for the infos...i guess it's going to be either the Fx 2000 or the 3000...after all, i am working on a dual 3.0 xeon, so with this card, i guess i'll have a very good workstation. i'll be replacing one of the cards i like the most, my old geforce 3 ti 500 so i am sure my huge polygon count scenes will notice the difference:)

[3Dfx_Sage]

EEEK! do NOT get the 2000 and DEFINITELY dont get the 1000! For gaming these cards are abslute poo. The 3000 will be a good improvement but I still can't recommend it.

[loop29]

Quadro FX 2000 will be on par with a FX 5800 and Quadro FX 3000 with a Geforce FX 5900.

regards

[MCronin]

Originally posted by 3Dfx_Sage
EEEK! do NOT get the 2000 and DEFINITELY dont get the 1000! For gaming these cards are abslute poo. The 3000 will be a good improvement but I still can't recommend it.

Have you ever played with a 1000? I'm not talking about judging it by benchmarks, I mean actually played on one? I have. I had one on an Athlon 2200+ and it ran every game I tried more than acceptably, including the leaked demos of a couple of very big upcoming games ;) Of course, I'm the type of player who's content running at lower resolutions so long I can crank up all the options an get framerates over 60. With the FX 1000 I was able to run every game at 800x600 or 1024x768 with all the visual options for the games on highest quality and I could play just fine. Don't know how it is for Max, but it runs Houdini, Maya, and Wings splendidly, works great with Linux as well. I'd recommend it if someone wanted a workstation card that could play games without breaking the bank in a heartbeat.

Right now I'm using a Quadro 3000 in a slightly faster machine (2.8 Ghz P4) and honestly for the work I do and the games I've played, I don't see a significant improvement in this card over the 1000. It's a bit quicker, but not enough to justify the price tag, I don't think.

[3Dfx_Sage]

well, no I havn't played with a 1000. I have, however, played with a 2000 and the games I try to play are unplayable at times without AA/AF on. Turn AA and AF on (which I consider a neccesity, once you've had it you can never go back) and the it's impossible to d anything. I am guessing you are talking about Mr Carmacks game? If so, then the nVidia cards do have a definite advantage there because the engine makes heavy use of stencil-only passes and during stencil-only passes the NV3x can churn out 8 pixels per clock.

[MCronin]

We'll just agree to disagree then. I don't consider AA a necessity however I was able to play with AA just fine on the machine I was talking about at 800x600.

No matter what card you get there will always be at least one game or app it doesn't run well, and there will always be something bigger, badder and better just around the corner, or some game on the horizon that's going to choke your card. I'm for the most part happy with Quadros except like I said the 3000 wasn't worth the price of admission in my case. I never want to go back to gaming cards because really I think DCC performance is much more impotant to me than a game I'll probably get bored with after a day or two.

[3Dfx_Sage]

ah, you were running 800x600. I have an LCD which requires me to run everything at 1280x1024 and even then withut AA things just look horrible to me. However, I suppose that might be because I was spoiled on 4xRGSS (Voodo5). But, I should warn you that the FX 1000 is slower than a 980XGl aka Ti4600. The FX's real problems come up when it comes to shaders version 2.0 (and equivalent OpenGL shaders). The game I am having troubble with is Lineage2 which uses an engine slightly modified from the UT2K3 engine (I forget it's name) and certainly isn't cutting-edge. My friends Radeon 9600 Mobile runs the game perfectly with all graphics maxed, uncluding 6xFSAA and 8xAF.

[diavoletto__]

well, a probably silly question, but what might justify the price tag of a FX 3000 (around 2000$ right?) i do agree with you MCronin, you'll get bored from a game after a while.
my scenes contain lots of polygons (~250 000 minimum and can reach 500 000 poly when visualising indoor scenes with high detailed furnitures) so can a FX 1000 handle them especially with walkthrought anim?

[3Dfx_Sage]

a 980XGL will be faster than a FX 1000. Th e only difference is you wont be able to use PS/VS 2.0 shaders in games... but that's kind of a moot point because at 300MHz the FX1000 is going to be slow to do 2.0 shaders at a playable speed anyhow. However, the 1100 would be faster than the 980XGL and can do a minimal ammount of 2.0 shaders at a somewhat playable speed.

[stephen2002]

I have a QuadroFX 1000 and with the newer 5x.xx drivers even new games such as Halo, Max Payne 2, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Tomb Raider: AOD, etc. are perfectly playable (about 30fps when a lot is going on) at 1280x1024 with 4x anistropic filtering. I have the AA turned off because it dosn't make enough difference to me to justify the performance loss. Newer games are basically unplayable when AA is on because the processing expensive shaders must be rendered for a whole lot more pixels to create the final image.

I get about 3200 in 3DMark2003. If you put better cooling on the card it is quite overclockable. I got it up to the Quadro FX2000 speeds without a hitch but it was getting too hot for my confort. At that speed I got about 5000 in 3DMark2003.

As for polycount in OpenGL in an informal test I was able to run a quad-viewport scene in Lightwave that had ~300,000 polys (a simple object duplicated many times by a particle system) at ~30fps without a hitch. Applying a 1024x1024 texture to all of the objects (just one mind you) didn't slow it down at all.

[3Dfx_Sage]

Originally posted by stephen2002
Newer games are basically unplayable when AA is on because the processing expensive shaders must be rendered for a whole lot more pixels to create the final image.
actually, that's only true when using *xS modes which are unavailable in OpenGL anyhow. When running QC, 2x, or 4x FSAA multisampling is used which only requires one (filtered) texture sample and one pass through the saders. In the *xS modes the chip uses a combination of multisampling and supersampling which means the shaders do have to be run more than once.

For comparrison, the Radeons are capable of running 8xAF and 6xFSAA (and their 6xFSAA is better than nVidia's 8xS because ATi's is gama corrected, still not better than the Voodoo5's 4x RGSS FSAA ;)) and the NV40 *might* be capable of true schotastic sampling, and with the bandwidth it has it should be capable of doing up to 16x at reasonable speeds. Also, ATi's AF is somewhat inferior in quality because it doesnt apply the full sampling rate to all pixels, only those that it deems nessesary (thus making it faster). However, nVidia doesn't use true trilinear filtering anymore- it's just a blurred bilinear filter. Some people don't notice the difference, but to some the artifacts it creates are rather hideous.

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