which video card for a maya 5 work station

[TheClick]

save up for another 2 weeks and get a firegl for $360.
It comes with Maya 4.5 ple.
just a suggestion!

[brudney]

i would go for quadro. it depends on whether you want to use it in 3d only or maybe in games as well. quadro is gonna rock in opengl and r9800 in directx...

[hank bernard]

I also use flash and other 2d programs so I need a card that would be good for 2d stuff too, like photoshop. Who make the firegl? I'm not a gamer.

[Novakog]

ATI makes the FireGL - but DO NOT get an ATI card unless you do a lot of gaming, they are such crap in Maya.

Any 3d card will work fine in 2d programs. I would say get a Quadro.

Or, someone else comment here, maybe get a GeForce and softquadro it, because the Quadro 750 XGL is not very powerful in comparison to an equally priced GeForce, it might just be more stable but I don't know whether it's more stable than a softquadroed GF6 (perhaps 6800 non-ultra when it comes out?) would be.

[Ckerr812]

There will never be a softquadro for 6000 series of cards, well at least not from Unwinder.


By Unwinder on the guru3d board:

Guys, what are you talking about?

1) SQ4 doesn't support 6x.xx and never will
2) NVstrap driver doesnt support NV4x series yet
3) NVStrap antiprotection doesn't support 6x.xx yet



Also to answer your question get the Quadro, ATI's are horrible in Maya, even their pro cards.

The Quadro will be alot faster in maya, even if it is a generation older, it will be slower in games though then the ati.

[Novakog]

Well crap monkey.

I hope SOMEONE does it. Or else I might have to get off my lazy ass and learn how to hack drivers.

[elvis]

Originally posted by Ckerr812
There will never be a softquadro for 6000 series of cards, well at least not from Unwinder.

That quote doesn't indicate he will never make a softquadro for 6800's. All it says is existing SQ4 code won't work.

I'm sure unwinder can't resist the temptation to hack yet another nvidia card, at least to some extent. Although I hear the GeForce/Quadro chips these days have far greater differences than ever before, which no doubt puts the breaks on for some features.

[hank bernard]

thanks for your replies, but for the price the ati seems pretty good. I have a matrox 550 right now so that'll let you know where I'm at. The ati 9800 pro is $215 on newegg. Seems like the best bang for the buck. I'm using maya to render out as a swf file so I'm not dealing with textures at all. You can imagine my matrox in maya isn't pretty. I have to use 256 colours just to get it to work half desently. So unless someone can point a better card for under $250 that also looks nice in photoshop and flash I think I'm going with the ati.

[Novakog]

Hmmm, yay! I can only hope it will work in Mray's OpenGL rendering acceleration...

[Ckerr812]

hey Guys,

I have had a couple emails with unwinder, and I read the guru3d forums the odd time.

What I got was that he probably won't be doing anymore softquadro.

Mainly because ever sinse the Quadro FX series, the quadro cards have more transistors. Some people can mod a FX, card to quadro fx, but it's for show only, it gives you no extra OpenGl extensions, and no performance gain. The quadro 2's and 4's it worked on, but that's were it stopped, except for the nv30. So for the people that modded there geforce FX, sorry to say it's just software accelerated and probably slower in some cases.

That's why unwinder said it's just not worth his time anymore, and the more nvidia changes the hardware and Drivers, the harder and more time consuming it is on unwinder, and he said it's alot easier just to update riva tuner. He's said on the forums many times that he won't supply any more mod scripts with rivatuner.

Who knows though he could try again, but I highly doubt it.

[Novakog]

Originally posted by Ckerr812
That's why unwinder said it's just not worth his time anymore, and the more nvidia changes the hardware, I am guessing the harder and more time consuming it is on unwinder, and he said it's alot easier just to update riva tuner.


Wait, I'm confused (I don't know much about this stuff) - isn't riva tuner the softquadro utility?

BTW, softquadro SHOULDN'T help the performance much if any, but what it does really improve is stability. I have no care for performance, I just want less bugs in Maya.

[Ckerr812]

Originally posted by Novakog
Wait, I'm confused (I don't know much about this stuff) - isn't riva tuner the softquadro utility?


Yea, you need riva tuner/nvstrap for Softquadro, but rivatuner is an utility that unwinder made to "tweak" and overclock your nv cards, and that is what he concentrates on.

About the stability thing, I don't think that's true really. The normal geforce drivers are perfectly capable and stable, what nv strap does is change the Hardware id of the card (which can also be hard modded), and then using the anti protection then the softquadro patch, it takes the extra hardware calls the Quadro driver sends to the card, and sends them to the cpu instead of the gpu.

So you get some (not all) of the extra features like aa lines, and hardware lights. So you get the extra's, but I wouldn't say it's any more stable.

[elvis]

Originally posted by Ckerr812

Mainly because ever sinse the Quadro FX series, the quadro cards have more transistors. Some people can mod a FX, card to quadro fx, but it's for show only, it gives you no extra OpenGl extensions, and no performance gain. ...

That's why unwinder said it's just not worth his time anymore

For me personally, softquadro represented a kick in the face to nvidia more than an cheap quadro for the masses. It proved that big companies were using their marketing leverage to charge more money to those who could afford it, and made those who couldn't afford it suffer with a "gaming card" tag.

The fact that the new Quadros have different transistor counts than their GeForce base is to me a good thing, as it means Nvidia are finally putting effort into making a quality solution for pro 3D users, and not just simply charging extra money for hidden potential.

Many years ago (I'm talking early to mid 80's here) when the first MIPS workstations were released, you could buy one of two models. the first was half the clockspeed of the other. For quite a sum of money, you could have an "upgrade" to double your clockspeed. An engineer would take your workstation away, "upgrade" it, and hand it back.

Little did people know there was simply a single flip-flop in the clock line that halved the clockspeed of all MIPS processors. The engineers used to simply remove this, and tell customers that the CPU speed was doubled.

Anyways, the MIPS manufacturers doing these dodgey upgrades got caught out, and ended up losing customers very quickly.

Nvidia faced a similar egg-on-face syndrome with Quadro to GeForce hacks. They were proven by some kid to be ripping people off simply for a few lines of code that made the difference between $200 and $2000.

To me, that's what SoftQuadro was about. It was about making nvidia admit they were pulling the dirty on their paying clients, and to actually release a product that is worth the money instead of a fake upgrade.

</rant>

[CgFX]

For me personally, softquadro represented a kick in the face to nvidia more than an cheap quadro for the masses. It proved that big companies were using their marketing leverage to charge more money to those who could afford it, and made those who couldn't afford it suffer with a "gaming card" tag.
</rant>
Softquadro people will never get it. It wasn't that us workstation users were paying more for a gaming card. Gamers were paying a couple extra dollars for the same die that had workstation features that weren't turned on because they didn't pay the virtual license for them.

It is simple. Produce the same die for 5 million people so that the workstation version is VASTLY cheaper.

What some of us never get is without that model you have $5000 Wildcat2 cards instead of $800 Quadro2 Pro cards that kick the crap out of the Wildcat.

If you ask me, thanks to softquadro we are headed back towards low volume, specialized solutions with a higher cost than we would have had them at.

[elvis]

Originally posted by CgFX
What some of us never get is without that model you have $5000 Wildcat2 cards instead of $800 Quadro2 Pro cards that kick the crap out of the Wildcat.

If you ask me, thanks to softquadro we are headed back towards low volume, specialized solutions with a higher cost than we would have had them at.

To be honest I'd never thought of it that way. You've put a rather depressing slant on the whole operation for me now. :(

[CgFX]

Originally posted by elvis
To be honest I'd never thought of it that way. You've put a rather depressing slant on the whole operation for me now. :(
hehehe... My bad.

Of course the other way to address this is to just put your normal, low precision gaming chip on your workstation board, give it a different name (FireGL) and different driver and hope that the rest of the industry gets down in the gaming mud with you.

Now I am making myself depressed.
:cry:

[elvis]

Anyone smell a 3DLabs comeback? :p

Although honestly I don't think so. Nvidia have managed to convince the market that they are the standard well enough now to make buckets of cash for this generation of cards at least. Especially with all this Gelato business.

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