I basically bought a whole new workstation for mudbox 2, and the videocard was a big choice. After a bunch of testing I went with a nVidia Geforce GTX 280 1GB. I have a quadro at work, and when I run mudbox at home or at work, I really feel no difference. The quardo is probably a touch faster, but not enough to be noticable. However, the price is where you’ll find the big difference 
I’d vote for the cheaper card.
you basically said that you’d buy a Quadro because it was a more serious card when everyone in this thread with experience with the Quadros is saying that they aren’t worth the cost for Mudbox.
Mac Pro 4.44144 GHz | 123 Gigglebytes of RAMs
Porsche Ballster
Dual Dachshund puppies with golden flea collers
You must have missed the part where I said that I’ve done a lot of reading, aka research, into the Quadro. Just because you may not have hands on experience with a component it certainly shouldn’t prevent you from purchasing it. But at the price of some of these Quadros you should certainly do your homework. Also, keep in mind, there is a huge price gap between a high end Quadro which is $3000+ and a low end one which is about the cost of a low end gaming card. If I were to buy a Quadro it would not be for just MB. I use a variety of software packages that would benefit from a Quadro.
As far as “sigwanking”, the way you describe it is no different then many of the artists on this very board who post how long it took them to do a piece of artwork like they are bragging that it takes mere minutes for them to create a masterpiece.
But getting back to the original topic here. Until you get out into the field and would utilize some of the key features, which seem to escape many of the posters here, of a Quadro, I would stick with what you have for now.
lol - I’ve art directed magazines and put my work in them. Does that qualify as being “in the field”?
Anyway, if you want to buy a Quadro FX 5600, I’ll sell it to you for an easy $1500. It’s sitting on my shelf unused.
“in the field” was not directed at you but rather the original poster, which why I referenced getting back to the original topic.
Well thanks again, guys.
My new GTX 275 is doing quite well with Mudbox 2009, as well as with Maya 2009 and Photoshop CS4. And a few other older 3D and 2D programs I’ve used for a while.
And of course it just rips through all my games, so I’m definitely happy about that.
I’ll definitely not be getting a Quadro, any time soon at least. Hopefully by the time I’m actually working in the industry things will have changed and the line between the high end workstation hardware and consumer hardware will be more blurred, more in line. At least that’s my prediction.
ya, I’d bet that 90% of Autodesk’s paying customers are probably running their apps on gaming cards. Anyway, Mudbox relies heavily on gaming-style tech (normal maps, fake occlusion, DOF, etc) for its realism. I think I’ve resigned myself to getting the fastest gaming video card every six months since it could always be faster. That said, it performs amazingly well with my 12-million poly scene and a Radeon 4870 and OS X.
heh - I’d like to see what “lightning fast” means at that polycount. I can’t get there because the Mac version of MB is 32-bit for now.
Damn.
I didn’t even know EVGA made a 2 GB GTX 285. When I was shopping, all I came across was the 1 GB version. And that one is only $150 more than what I paid.
Now that I’ve seen that I might have to take advantage of their 90 day step-up plan. 
Running Mud 2009 on a 7950GT 512MB, and it equals my Quadro FX370 at work, if not better. Maya’s the annoying one on this graphics card, as overlay panels glitch it out big-time. But Mudbox is fluid, fast, and I’m still getting 30+ FPS on high-poly models. I really wish Autodesk had incorporated some of Mud’s viewport rendering features in Maya 2009, but no sense crying about it.
My point is that I’ve had no problems with Mudbox running a very old GT model GPU. Not that the Quadro I’m comparing it too is a great card, but for low-end, low-budget work like I do, I find it obnoxious that Maya works wonderfully at work on the Quadro and horribly on the Geforce, but Mudbox works great on both. Make up your minds, Autodesk!
I don’t know what, if anything, this could say about Quadros, Maya, and graphics cards in general, but in the Autodesk Maya 2009 Essential Training videos from Lynda with George Maestri, he explains in one of the lessons that you need a Quadro. Well he doesn’t really say you NEED a Quadro for general purposes, but rather for the more advanced features, and he is apparently using one.
Those videos were made in December of 2008. He doesn’t mention his PC specs that I remember, but I would assume he’s working with a fairly competent computer.
However in several places in several videos there is a certain degree of artifacting of the meshes and ghosting for lack of a better way of explaining it. Display errors, basically. Could be caused by the recording software, maybe, maybe not.
But I was curious so I tried it using my 8800GTS. Using the same screen resolution, opening the same files, talking over it while recording with Camtasia Studio, then edited my videos using the same H.264 codec and the same frame rate of 10 FPS.
The result was I didn’t have any of those display errors and my frame rate was better overall. Not only that but I could go up even further in resolution and not have problems, and still get overall better quality.
So he’s telling me I need a Quadro, while my 8800 GTS is out-performing whatever it was he was using.
As I said, I don’t know what that indicates, but at best I’d say it negates his claim one gets better performance in Maya with a Quadro. I’m sure there are some occasions where that’s true, but with either my 8800 GTS or my GTX 275, as far as I’m concerned performance in Maya 2009 @ 1920x1200 is well beyond just “good enough”. It’s really good, actually. I may miss out on some Quadro-exclusive hardware rendering features here and there, but the more important thing is the produced result, not the screen eye candy, and Mental Ray handles that part of it.
I agree . I just got a MacPro4,1 Quad-Core Intel Xeon and the Radeon 4870 with Mudbox has been outstanding.
Edit: I’ve also heard outstanding reviews for the GTX285 
the Mac version? I don’t think that’s public until June. I’m interested in seeing how it performs. I may review it for Ars.
Yup, I think you are correct 
. I’ve only heard/read reviews on it;
April 29
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/04/29/nvidia_prepping_geforce_gtx_285_for_mac_pro.html
April 30
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/04/nvidia-to-give-mac-pro-owners-some-gpu-love.ars
The last link also talks about the Quadro for Mac, mentioning the Quadro has 1.5 Gigs & 192 processing cores. The GTX 285 has 240 processing cores & 1GB of memory. From the link, “Benchmarks suggest the card even outperforms the Radeon HD 4870 in the PC version, and NVIDIA is promising that the GTX 285 Mac Edition will have identical performance.”
Edit: Ah, lol! Stupid me, and I’m sure you know the last link (I’m so dumb… )
The last link also talks about the Quadro for Mac…
Are you implying that Macs can use graphics cards now?
AWESOME.
(polite humor, folks…)
hehe - ya, let’s hope the newer Nvidia drivers for Snow Leopard can close this rather significant gap between the Windows drivers that I reported.
