Lightwave's technical adherance

[iratethemad]

I would like to know this also anyone?

[Mattoo]

I read on this board sometime ago that lightwave adheres more to hardware for performance than your graphics cards. Is this true? I am planning to get a very powerful graphics card, but I am now rethinking that, if it won't have that much of an effect on Lightwave's performance. What would be better, the graphics card, or more RAM?

The card is a RADEON X800 PRO 256MB AGP Graphics Card, by the way.
A faster (more modern) graphics card will allways help. Lightwave uses OpenGL quite extensively, even for drawing windows and panels - not just 3D.
The one thing LW currently doesn't do is use the fancy new architecture in the new graphics cards. LW uses the gfx card for little more than throwing around lots of polygons.

But the same could be said for most of the other apps. Although they do have the ability to use DirectX built shaders within the viewports it's not commonly used as they have to be specifically written and do not represent as a preview what might be shown in the final render. They are used more for games creation.
The current implementation of OpenGL in LW is on a par with what Maya uses it for - some single layer transparency and simple multi-texturing.

[ThePumpkinKing]

So basically (since all I want to do is make lightwave be able to handle more polygons without slowing down) maybe I should invest into more RAM?

[Per-Anders]

all 3d apps use hardware acceleration for your graphics card to a greater or lesser extent. however the difference between many cards performance (and especially workstation v highend consumer) is really not that great in these programs. the biggest factor is the CPU and mobo. at the end of the day there's only so much information can be send to the graphics card, the bigger the pipeline and faster the cpu the more you can push through. then you have to factor in the difference between just navigation around a scene and actually modeling/manipulation/animation of scene elements. all of the later that requires processor power and doesn't really use much of any graphics board. so don't expect to have any speedup or massive increases in the density or complexity of the objects you model or animate.

[ThePumpkinKing]

Well, can you recommend anything I can do or buy that would either speed up my processor or speed up lightwave so it can handle more polygons, or make the rendering speed up? (I have a 2.8 gig pentium 4, by the way). Will more RAM help with anything?

[Mattoo]

More RAM will only help if you're running out of it. You'll know that if your machine grinds to a halt and thrashes and grinds the Hard drive.
If you want your OpenGL views sped up then buying a better graphics card is the main way to improve that.
However, deformations, such as those produced by bones, dynamics and displacements are done on the CPU, and so a faster CPU will help.

Simply put, the drawing of polygons are done by the gfx card. As soon as you start moving/squishing/mushing those polygons then now the CPU is having to work aswell as the gfx card.
It depends on what you want to do really, 2 examples:

A modeler, who requires the ability to draw lots of polygons on screen at once, but those polygons aren't dynamically deformed - they'd need a good gfx card and a lot of RAM.

Whereas, a character animator will largely require nice and fast updates on their models while they are deformed by the bones and other mesh effects. So a good CPU is important and RAM and gfx card are less of a requirement since they'll probably only have the character and a few props and stuff on screen.

[xvampire]

just a bit few OT question hehe :
is rendering(not real time) in LW need a good graphic card? or ram?

[Steve McRae]

a. stick with Nvidia if you want the best openGL performance in pro apps - ati is not as good as Nvidia for pro openGL
b. stick with the GeForce series for LW - lightwave does not make use of the Quadro series to make it worth the money

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