New graphics card for my workstation

#1

Hi,

I currently have a GeForce GTX 460 in my workstation at home, but the viewport performance in Maya is quite bad when the polygon count goes up. Therefore, I want to upgrade my graphics card, but I am not sure what I should pick.

I am primarily using Maya, Mudbox, Nuke, Houdini, Photoshop and some other Adobe applications.

I have considered a GTX 760, but would I gain any worthwhile benefits by going with a more expensive 970, considering what I’ll be using it for? I also considered a Quadro card, but it is probably too expensive for my budget.

Or would a GTX 750 Ti be adequate?

I may be biased towards Nvidia as I have had Nvidia for many years, without anything to complain about (apart from the bad performance of 460).

I am not really going to be gaming much on this PC, at least not any very demanding titles, so performance in games are not important.

I hope you have some advice, thanks in advance :slight_smile:

#2

I’m currently using a GTX 460, a 560Ti, and a 660 for Maya. I’d been researching a decent card for my TV-PC lately, and the 750Ti is the sweet spot for average usage and light gaming, but it’s still 15% slower than my GTX 660 on paper.

So of my three current cards, the 660 is best, the 460 is second, and the 560 Ti is actually the least powerful of the three (for Maya.) If the 750Ti isn’t as powerful as the 660, that would land it somewhere closer to your current GTX 460 in performance. The tale of the tape shows them having about the same bandwidth, texel rate, and pixel rate although the 750Ti has more memory and a higher clock speed.

GTX 460 vs GTX 750Ti (direct comparison)

The 760 however would be a nice jump up. For the money, it would be a huge improvement over your 460. It’s basically an opened-up version of my 660, with more shaders, texture mapping unity, and ROPs. For the value (under $250), the 760 might be your best bet right now.

#3

What cpu and speed do you run?
What are you doing when it is slow?, animating characters, physics, or just modelling
What is your budget?

I will say up front, the 750Ti is an ok card, but it isnt much of an upgrade from what you already have.

#4

Many thanks for your replies :slight_smile:

I have an i7-3930k, running stock at 3.8GHz, I got 16 GB of ram. It is primarily when I am modeling that the frame rate gets rather low, both in Maya and Mudbox. In fact my old GTS250 was performing better.

Sounds like I should spend a bit more than a 750 Ti - however, the new Asus Strix cooler with its 0 dB mode at idle seems really nice, as I really like a silent PC when it’s idle.

Are there any 760 with a comparable cooler? :slight_smile:

#5

I just found this review of the 750 Ti: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-750-ti-review,3750-18.html

I know benchmarks may not always provide a true measurement of the performance, but it actually seems the 750 Ti is faster than a 760 in Maya?

#6

Viewport performance will have changed since 2013, due to significant overhauls in Maya’s Viewport 2 tech. You will note however that the spec presented there is Maya 2013 working from a 2009 benchmark - hardly accurate or relevant now, to be fair. It’s also an OpenGL bench, which means Viewport 1 tech. Viewport 2 can push a much higher amount of polys in my experience, perhaps 4x what Viewport 1 can handle. It’s actually a retired benchmark.

Also the GTX 580 dominates that metric. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the 580 can push more polys at a higher framerate than the Quadros/FireGLs, but the 580 was the last GTX which didn’t cripple dual-precision in the Nvidia gaming lines.

The 750Ti would be an upgrade over your 460, but when pushing millions of polys you won’t really feel it. I think you’re looking at either driver issues with your 460 or bad settings in Nvidia Control Panel, really. I ran a GTS250 prior to my 460 as well, and the 460 destroyed it when I upgraded.

If you want to push millions of polys at a decent framerate, you’re really going to need something heavier than the 750.

#7

Ah okay, I see :slight_smile:

Perhaps my GTX 460 haven’t been running optimal then, I have been updating drivers regularly though. However, I do want to buy a new graphics card anyway, as I am putting together a secondary PC where I will be using the 460.

I think I’ll go with an MSI TwinFrozr GTX 760 - do you think there would be anything to gain with the 4 GB edition, or is the 760 not fast enough to utilize it?

#8

More VRAM is always a good idea. If you can afford it, get the one with 4GB. The GPU will utilize whatever it can, and its speed doesn’t affect the memory. It just means you can load in more texture/geometry data before it bogs down. In Maya, Viewport 2 will handle higher-res textures better, for example, and more of them.

#9

The 760 4 GB cost about the same as a 770 2 GB though, do you think it would be better with 4 GB than the speed increase a 770 would give me?

#10

They use the same GPU, but the 770 has more shaders exposed (it tested better at the factory), and will be considerably faster than the 760. Unless you’re using heavy textures, 2GB should be enough for most purposes. I use a 660 with 2GB of VRAM and it does pretty well for my arch/viz work and landscaping. The 770 pushes a lot more math, so it will likely crunch those polys quite a bit better than the 760 would. It’s also clocked a bit higher per core.

http://www.hwcompare.com/14793/geforce-gtx-760-vs-geforce-gtx-770/760 vs 770:Core Speed 980 MHz 1046 MHz Shader Speed 980 MHz 1046 MHz Memory Speed 1502 MHz (6008 MHz effective) 1753 MHz (7012 MHz effective) Unified Shaders 1152 1536 Texture Mapping Units 96 128 Render Output Units 32 32

#11

I would take the slower 4g card over the slightly faster 2g card.

#12

Thanks for your advice :slight_smile:

I think I will stick with the 760 2GB as the 4 GB version gets a little close to a 970 in price, at least here where I live, and then I’d rather get that :slight_smile:

#13

On a second thought I may go with a GTX 970 with 4 GB. However, I couldn’t really find much info about its performance in Maya.

Do you have any idea how it performs? Could it be a bad decision to go with 970 as it is quite new (potential driver issues etc.)?

#14

quadros are awesome with maya with the legacy viewport.

My machine using scene with 39 objects, 22 million polygons total, on 1440p monitor:

Geforce 670 GTX
legacy viewport: 2fps
viewport 2.0: 50fps

Quadro k5200 
legacy viewport: 50fps
viewport 2.0: 50fps


I'm sure a geforce 970 would be faster than a 670
guessing maybe 2.7 fps in legacy viewport
and 80fps with viewport 2.0?

I really don’t like using viewport 2.0 since it will randomly crash maya on occasion and it has a delay to load models into it every time you import something or unhide an object. Might not be an issue for some people, but on heavy individual objects, it’s a drag. The AO is nice to have though.

#15

I guess for most CG artists a Quadro is no longer a top choice?

#16

It never was

#17

hm, I could have sworn that at some point I heard it was the best for things like the Maya viewport and Photoshop.

#18

You most often hear this from people who want to sell you one, or people who bought one and are trying to kid themselves it was a good idea. Quadros are a good choice if you need realtime genlocks and SDI outputs, certified drivers for critical systems like realtime broadcast vizRT graphics, or certain CAD applications which just fall over and fail on anything other than a specific set of cards. Or, if you need high speed double precision GPU calculations.

If you’d like an analogy.

This is the Panasonic LX100, it is a very nice high end compact camera, it costs $800
http://www.panasonic.com/uk/consumer/cameras-camcorders/lumix-digital-cameras---point-and-shoot/compact-cameras/dmc-lx100.html

This is the Leica D-LUX. It costs $1300. It is identical.
http://en.leica-camera.com/Photography/Compact-Cameras/Leica-D-Lux-Typ-109

Most quadros are geforces with different labels stuck on the front.

#19

or also if you want viewport stereo 3D support and support for 30-bit color displays

#20

well I’m glad I know now! thanks for the responses