AMD FirePro W7000, Quadro K4000 or GTX 780ti for Maya?

#1

I’m looking for a graphic card upgrade from my Gigabyte GTX 680 OC for Maya, I need a card that can support a high poly count with fast render times (I don’t do gaming). I can’t afford anything higher than these cards & mainly work with Maya, Mudbox & AE. My set up is:

P9X79 Pro

i7 4820K (OC)

G-Skill Ripjaws DDR3 2400 32Gb ram

Samsung840Pro SSD

Corsair H60 cooling

I’ve heard so many conflicting reports about the WS cards - the Quadro is slow for the price while the W7000 looks great going head to head with the K4000. Looking on youtube, the W7000 looks to be a good bet (I’m sure the videos are endorsed by AMD), but then I check out the reviews on Newegg & the W7000 is slaughtered!

My other alternative is to go for the GTX 780ti. Would this gaming card do the job? I’ve had no problems with my GTX 680 OC, but would like something faster for very high poly count & faster renders in MR.

Any thoughts as I’m going round in circles here?

#2

There’s nothing significantly faster than your 680 card, anything you buy would be a few percent faster at best. Also, are you using a gpu render engine? If not, the gfx card won’t make it render anything faster.

#3

the quadro and firepro are quite a bit faster in viewport 1 than the geforces, at least with dealing with large geometry, like 300-400% faster. With viewport 2 though, the geforces are faster than quadros by at least 200 %

Like imashination said, there’s not much significant difference between the 600 and 700 series geforces in maya. Maybe 10-20%

IMO the main question to ask is if you plan to use mainly viewport 1 or 2, have a need for raw GPU performance with openCL or CUDA, or if you need a lot of video memory. I can’t speak for maya 2015 or 2014, but I don’t fully trust viewport 2.0 in maya 2013. It loves to randomly crash maya regardless of driver or settings.

#4

Thanks for your replies. To be honest, I’ve no idea which MR uses, the CPU or GPU & which would be faster. With what I’ve got, would the GPU engine be a better option?

#5

Youd need to tell us a lot more about what you’re doing. What are you rendering, how long are the render times, how complex are the scenes. gpu render engines have limitations which for a lot of people can be too limiting. That, plus the cooling systems on the cpu tend to be a lot more robust than the ones found on gfx cards, so you’d need to be careful.

#6

It’s a mixed bag, sometimes heavy landscape scenes with heavy satellite imagery jpegs up to 20,000 pixels with a few million polys, these aren’t too bad to render because there’s no need for GI or FG as I import the image on a surface shader, the problem is orbiting, it struggles over 3 mil polys in the default viewport, problem with viewport 2, though it’s faster, is that I’m more limited with image size. As for AO in other scenes, it takes quite a long time even in layers.

At the end of the day, the renders aren’t too bad for the machine I’ve got. At the mo, I still don’t trust the W7000 cos of the reviews in Newegg, & as for Quadros, the prices are ridiculous - I had an FX 5600 a couple of years ago (got one cheap), & to be honest, the GTX 680 performs just as good as the FX 5600 & runs twice as cool even with an OC of 1147 Mhz.

What would you advise, wait till the next gen GTX 8 series comes out & see what they can offer or go with the WS cards?