Selecting a Graphics Card for an 8 hour competition, need opinions

[GregHess]

2 HP:
Dual P4 3.0Gig
1G RDram
Windows 2000 or XP (unsure as of yet)

There are no Dual P4's. I assume you mean Xeon. Otherwise you might want to recalculate the cost of the systems.

For 3dsmax, the fastest available graphics card would be a Quadro 2000-FX. Nothing else on the market is within a competitive range for raw performance.

Of course, you'll also pay out the rear end for it. Which would make something like a 500 USD 980XL (Quadro4) a nicer purchase.

Avoid the Wildcat VP's for max.

[athosghost]

http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030321/index.html

Thought this might help make up your mind.

[DigitalCrystal]

Yes Greg,

I ment to say xeon. :) Sorry about that. We already have the systems on the way, and that was the information that was relayed to me. But I believe it was an xeon. but I assumed that at 3.0 Gig, it would be a p4. Thanks for the clear up.

[Schwinnz]

Originally posted by athosghost
http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030321/index.html

Thought this might help make up your mind.

The first thing Greg Hess will make you know is never trust Tom's Hardware :wip: .

Isn't it Greg ? ;)

[GregHess]

The first thing Greg Hess will make you know is never trust Tom's Hardware

Nah, you can trust tomshardware...just check the site after they've already changed all the data, and then lied about doing so.

As for the new member...you might want to check out this thread.

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=24408&highlight=tomshardware

[DigitalCrystal]

:surprised That bad ey? :thumbsdow ;)

[athosghost]

Don't get me wrong, Greg. I agree that toms ain't the greatest. Normally I skim through to get a rough idea of some benchmarks then compare them to other benchmarks. I can't say that I trust any of these web sites. After all, the tests are run on behalf of the card makers. I posted that link cause it was the only one that I found for QuadroFX 2k’s numbers. (and they are damn impressive)

[dvornik]

If you go with a Quadro (or a softquadroed geforce4) make sure that Maxtreme 4.00.28 works for you. I would never go to a max modelling competition before I actually test the card and the rest of the system under similar conditions.

Without Maxtreme Quadros are no better than Geforces; theoretically (I haven't tested them myself) FireGL with Maximum are the next best thing in max to Quadros with Maxtreme and are way better than any Nvidia cards with OGL. But you DO need to test it before using it in a mission-critical situation.

[elvis]

Originally posted by dvornik
Without Maxtreme Quadros are no better than Geforces; theoretically (I haven't tested them myself)

well i have, and quadros are much better than geforces even under openGL, particularly in high poly wireframe scenes.

careful with the wild statements, friend.

[DigitalCrystal]

Alrighty, well, from what I'm hearing, the quadro (not the audi 'quatro' like I typed in on my first post) is one of the best cards to go with for my 3d studio max setup?

What kind of improvements as far as render times could I expect by moving from a Geforce 4 to a quadro... I know I'm probably comparing grapes and grapefruits but I haven't ever tested the waters of -highend- graphics hardware before. If any of you have any kind of benchmarks, whether personal or publically listed, I would love to have a look. I really would like to see how the higher end graphics cards hold up under raytrace and the liking.

Thanks for all of your help so far folks.

[GregHess]

I hate htis !@)($&!@(@$& server.

Stupid !#@)($&!@)( .

Well here I am REPLYING AGAIN.

1) Video cards don't affect render performance...only viewport preformance.

Having a quadro vs a geforce will not do ANYTHING to your render times.

Render times are determined by CPU speed/memory amount/bandwidth.

There are some rendering accelerators, but these are usually more trouble then the benefit they bring.

Once again. You will gain ZERO performance benefit in Rendering speed from a 3d accelerator.

[MCronin]

I would just go with what you got. I don't think you are going to be able to push the hardware you have to it's limits in 8 hours time. If you have Dual 3 gig processors you should be able to render plenty fast.

[DigitalCrystal]

Thanks for the clear up Greg. So, by having a 3d accelerator, like a quadro, I would have a smoother time while modeling and animating? But when it came time to render, it would mainly be based on the ram and cpu and cache?

Thanks for the info though..

[DigitalCrystal]

Originally posted by MCronin
Dual 3 gig processors....should be able to render plenty fast.

I have no doubt about that, at the state competition we used dual 2.4g xeons and we rendered our whole 10 second animation in 10 minutes or so. Our design was efficient and so it didn't waste time, *we only had 4 hours at the state competition*. We, my partner and I just want to insure that we have the largest advantage possible when it come to computers.

I guess my whole thing was that I was under the impression that the better your graphics card the better your render performance was.

[singularity2006]

i will have absolutely no idea what u guys need in terms of video technology because I stopped paying attention to video cards entirely (as a result of cost issues) during the release of the first GeForce card... my knowledge past that is null and void...

however, what i can say is OMFG!! Good look to u folks... that sonds like one seriously rad competition.... that's like... a triathalon.. but of hi tech.... I had no idea such things existed.... man, insane..... =D

[DigitalCrystal]

Thanks!

It gets tense in those last few hours. The first 2 just fly by, it seems like 40 minutes pass and boom, "6 hours remaining" :eek:. Last year we ended up with 14th at the National Competition, this year we are hoping to place within the top 3. We just want to make sure our systems are top notch so that all we have to worry about is ourselves!

Thanks again man!

[Marc Andreoli]

Where is that competition ? Is there a website ?
cheers

don't worry, I don't plan on attending with my PIII/ Geforce2
:hmm:

[elvis]

to expand on what greg mentioned ealier:

no, video cards do not affect your render times. however, if you are dealing with very high poly or complex scenes, manipulating objects and their parameters in your viewport can be extrememly painful on low-end video cards. i can't speak for everyone, but the guys i work with deal with MASSIVE scenes, and we don't even consider anything less than a Quadro4-980XGL as a starting point.

in a time limited competition, a few seconds here and a few seconds there quickly add up to half an hour of wasted time waiting on viewports to re-draw. consider also that a good shaded view in a viewport can *sometimes* remove the need to test-render a scene (obviously this isn't always the case, but occasionally you can get a better idea through a more accurate viewport).

if you've got the cash to throw at a dual xeon 3.06GHz system, my guess is a couple of quadro4 750XGLs really won't hurt the budget. if this competition (and your 3d in general) really does matter to you, i'd suggest investing in these cards. they aren't that expensive compared to entry-level pro cards 2-3 years ago, and will serve you much better than a gaming card in the shape of a geforce/radeon.

just my 2 cents.

[elvis]

Originally posted by GregHess
I hate htis !@)($&!@(@$& server.

Stupid !#@)($&!@)( .

Well here I am REPLYING AGAIN.

well all i can say is thank god it's not me.

if any of the cgnetworks admins are reading, i'm more than happy to offer my services in suggesting a hardware setup that doesn't fall in a heap every time there's more than 100 simultaneous requests. :)

[DigitalCrystal]

Thanks again for the info.

Marc: The competition is in Kansas City, Missouri. It's taking place about mid June this year. There is a website for it but I can't find it at the moment. There are other competitions going on with it also, not just 3d animation/visualization, there is architectural drafting and technical drafting...ect.

The guys we went up against last year were boasting some pretty nice machines. We only took a P3 1.2g with 512 ram *not ddr*+geforce 4 4400 and a Dual P3 xeon 2.2g+1gig Rdram+Gf4 4400. We rendered fairly fast for what we had last year.

I understand what you're saying elvis. I was working on a city scene for a project I had a few months back and I had to hide half of the city just to move around productively and that's using my home computer (with a GF4 4200).

[DigitalCrystal]

I guess if we needed to render faster we could always net render??

[GregHess]

As said previously...

3D accelerators only accelerate the viewports. (Aka modeling/animating).

The instant you press render, the power requirement jumps over to primarily the cpu, with secondary performance determined by the amount of ram, speed of the ram, and speed of the front side bus.

Here's some quick tips for rendering even faster.

Xeons are Hyperthreaded. Hyperthreading is only enabled under Windows XP...so to get full advantage out of the Xeon's, you'll have to be running Windows XP to fully utilize hyperthreading.

Currently hyperthreading works under almost all major 3d apps, giving anywhere from 6-20% increases in performance. But you won't get this benefit if your running Windows 2000.

If your using 3dsmax, consider picking up a 3rd party rendering solution. Max's default radiosity, lighttracer, GI engine is horribly slow. Other renderers like Vray render expodentially faster, actually allowing GI scenes to be calculated in minutes/seconds instead of hours. (Bucket rendering systems are also more ram efficent, and more processor/hyperthreading efficent).

Further more, going with a 3rd party renderer will allow you to do DR, or distributed rendering... This allows multiple computers to render the SAME FRAME at once. Each computer is handed a bucket, and they all work together to tear through the frames as quickly as possible.

With Vray and two 3.06 Xeon's, you'd have 8 buckets tearing through each frame.

As always, since this is a competition, you'd want to do some test runnings months in advance :).

[DigitalCrystal]

Thanks again Greg. This stuff just really interests me. Thanks for the tip on xp also! You mentioned the Vray Renderer as a 3rd party. Do you mean 3rd party as in a 3rd computer or as a seperate program running independant of Max? We are limited to 2 computers, that why I ask. Thanks again!

[GregHess]

www.vrayrender.com

There is a free version available, as well as a demo time limited full version. This actually lets you try the program out, before investing any money. Neat eh?

Its basically a plugin renderer to 3dsmax, much like brazil or final renderer.

This of course only applies if your using 3dsmax.

[DigitalCrystal]

Hey Greg,

I took a look Vray, and it really looks like something that would assist at our competition.

Can you folks think of anything else we could use to our advantage?

As of right now we are going with the two Dual 3gig xeons with 1gig ram. We are currently using the GeF4 and the Radeon, but we're now researching the Quadro as a possibility. Vray seems like a valuable asset. We'll probably be testing our current setup within the next month or so, so we'll see how fast these things will really run.

I'm interested in this whole bucket system. Care to elaborate?

Thanks for all your help.

[GregHess]

I'm not really into software dynamics. I just know what software runs better on X platform.

Vray is fast...thats all there is to it.

I'm hoping some vray users pop in here and explain it to me.

But here's a gander.

Scanline renders deal with the entire image at once. Bucket renderers deal with individual segments of that image and distribute them amongst the processors (or with DR to other machines). Because each bucket is just a portion of the entire image, less ram is used for the space allocated. Aka you do larger renders with less ram.

Now I'm just guessing there, so someone please slap me if I'm wrong.

There is also a giant vray forum, under support at www.vrayrender.com.

[DigitalCrystal]

Thanks. Yeah, hopefully someone will enlighten us. Sounds like something worth looking into.

If you don't mind me asking Greg, what do you do at your studio? You seem to know your stuff and just thought I'd ask!

[GregHess]

Lets see....

I'm a computer admin at the University of Maryland, and have been for the past 3 years.

I've done hardware/technical consulting for the past few years indepently.

I "worked" for Discreet as an Forum Assistant in charge of the Hardware/Software Troubleshooting department.

I write technical articles for 3dluvr.com.

I design furniture :).

www.3dluvr.com/crossbow/incoming/X.jpg

and my Cg graphics specialty is Lighting/Rendering. Fav art types are abstract and minimalist.

http://www.3dluvr.com/crossbow/incoming/Vray/thinktorii.jpg

http://www.3dluvr.com/crossbow/incoming/Vray/riplee.jpg

http://www.3dluvr.com/crossbow/incoming/Vray/glass.jpg

http://www.3dluvr.com/crossbow/incoming/Afterburn/womb.jpg

Hope that satisfy's your quesion.

[Marc Andreoli]

Greg, that Kraz table is really cool !!! Like the other stuff as well...
(sorry to be off topic)

[DigitalCrystal]

Right on Greg. The stuff looks real good.

[Nem]

sorry for another off topic post, but so far we've been discussing gfx cards for 3ds max, without money being an issue (and excluding the quadro FX cards) which card is best for maya? would it differ from max at all?

[GregHess]

Hrm...

Maybe I should post something in the art section :).

Maya has its own individual sets of problems. One of the big deals with maya is paint FX...alot of cards don't agree with that at all.

Additionally I don't think maya has a software viewport system...so if you get a card that doesn't like maya, your fubar'd. With max you just run software heidi.

[Nem]

doh! greg, u know any cards which maya would play nicely with?

[GregHess]

I know it likes a Apple Cinema Display and a Quadro 980XL :).

[Nem]

woohoo a 980! within my price range :D
shame i cant buy a cinema display tho :( ah well! im happy :D

[elvis]

Originally posted by Digital_Crystal
The competition is in Kansas City, Missouri. It's taking place about mid June this year. There is a website for it but I can't find it at the moment. There are other competitions going on with it also, not just 3d animation/visualization, there is architectural drafting and technical drafting...ect.

if you run into any HOK Sport guys, tell them Dan from Brisbane says hi. :)

[DigitalCrystal]

Sure thing Elvis.

[DigitalCrystal]

Hey hey folks,

Just wanted to update yall on the competition.

We won 1st!

whoooo wheee

they gave us plenty of goodies too:

Quadro fx500
3ds Max 5.1
Combustion 2.1
Cleaner (can't remember the version)
Viz 4

-Pluggins:
+Afterburn 3.0
+Dreamscape
+Final Toon
+Final Render
50% scholarship to the Art Institute, one of 'em :)
64mb flash drive USB2

THANKS DISCREET, NVIDIA, TURBOSQUID, ART INSTITUTE, HP!

[elvis]

wow! contratulations and top work on scooring the booty!

got any photos from the event?

[DigitalCrystal]

Thanks, We have pictures, but I don't have them. I'll see about finding them.

[Transform Gizmo]

congrats digital crystal!! i also just got back from the contest in kansas city, me and my partner took 2nd place. i know what you meant about the hardware some of those people were running at the contest, some pretty intense computing power.
one question, what was your overall score? we wound up with a 450 overall. they have a breakdown of the scores for the written test and all of the categories at http://www.skillsusa-register.org/ anyway, congrats again.

[DigitalCrystal]

Hey hey,

That's crazy that yall are on here too. Goes to show you that CGtalk has the best :).

Thanks for the link, it said we ended up with a final score of 461.

Congrats for you all the same!

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