Hey guys,
I’m a newcomer to CG. I’m going to buy a workstation graphic card to work in 3D softwares like Maya, Zbrush, Vray, etc.
I thought on Quadro K5000 and 6000 but I’m not sure which one is better.
This is a comparison between K500 and 6000.
http://www.game-debate.com/gpu/index.php?gid=1087&gid2=409&compare=quadro-k5000-vs-quadro-6000
why are you looking to spend so much money on a video card if you are new to CG?
there are many people using consumer graphics cards just fine for CG work…
That comparison is plainly and utterly wrong. Even the numbers are different from a lot of the publicly available factory ones.
Beside that, unless you have some very specific needs (HW Stereo in Nuke on Linux, DP computation, scientific applications, first tier mandatory certificates etc.) for the softwares you list there is no point whatsoever to fork out for a quadro.
Get a 780 or a Titan if you want to go top-end. Bear in mind all you will properly tap it for is a minuscule part of Maya, and possibly rendering if you use VRay RT, that’s it. ZBrush doesn’t even defer anything to the GPU, and most of maya is CPU capped.
If you were going to learn to play the guitar, would you pick up a simple $200 instrument or do you think the best thing to do is throw $3000 at the most expensive thing you can possibly find?
If you’re learning to drive, do you buy a second hand $1000 car or do you immediately purchase a $50,000 BMW?
I’m not entirely on board with the whole “beginners should use cheap stuff” philosophy.
If you’re loaded with cash there’s no reason to buy a crap car as a first car instead of a comfortable and super-safe BMW with full insurance to learn.
I feel that’s beside the point though.
Quite simply he listed the apps he’ll be using, and there’s little point to a k6k for them, and a k5k is horrible bang for buck at this point with the Titan having dropped sub 1k and the 780 available for even less.
All that said, there’s been so many threads about this, I don’t think more needs to be said, he can look back into the dozen or so that happened in the last two months alone and get more details from those.
Theres two parts to it for me really. The first is the whole “Pros use this, so I must have one to be professional!” line of thinking. the idea that you have to have certain branded items to do well. I see it when I go to studios and see slow GHz single chip Xeon workstations and low end quadro cards, when the ‘consumer’ stuff would have been twice the speed; the only reason they have it is because “thats what the pros use”
My brother gets the same thing with his videographer business. Turn up with the perfect tool for the job and then get sneered at because “thats not what pros use” Heaven forbid if theres no red ring around the end of the lens…
Secondly, I DO genuinely believe that picking the absolute fucking fastest hardware on the planet is not only overkill, but also quite detrimental to a person when they’re learning. If your 10 million poly model updates instantaneously, they’ll never learn that they’ve gone completely overkill with the poly count and that when it comes to rendering, everyone will hate having to use their models. If you grab a 24 core Xeon machine which ploughs through all the slow GI, blurry effects and such, he’ll have no real idea that on any actual production scene, he’s picking the slowest stuff to render.
On more than one occasion I’ve forced the render engine down to a single cpu core to show how shit-awful some of their texture and render setting choices are. In a nutshell, Ultra high end hardware for a newbie is a crutch, one that will screw him over the first time he goes into a job and suddenly has to work on a 4 year old machine.
I guess I’ll have to just, respectfully, agree to disagree in those regards. Not in principle, as much as in practice. I’ve run extremely expensive hardware at several turning points in my career, and I’ve never let it spoil me, and it’s enabled me more than anything (IE: in current times, good luck really learning and pushing Mari v2 on some crappy 1GB card, or pushing VP2 hard, or VRay RT without beefy ram 
).
That said, I do believe that this, as a hardware forum, is probably best used as a platform to discuss hardware first and foremost regardless of the level or presumed level of the user and how they will be affected by it.
I think there’s equal space and merit to the few who still bring up arguments for quadro cards (because there ARE a few worth making), those willing to prove that a gtx of sorts will work fine or better in many cases (with or without bang for buck considerations), and advice about bang for buck and not wasting one’s money.
I don’t feel indiscriminate discouragement to spend money only because we presume the OP might not learn the hard lessons by paying his dues on shitty hardware has much of a place though, it’s a bit of a slippery slope and easily becomes condescending (not that I’m accusing you of this, don’t get me wrong). Advice about saving it (money) of course always has its place, but it should be on economic/convenience grounds, not judgmental.
I agree with ThE_JacO and I get where imashination is coming from. The reason being, having components that lack the power is crippling and time consuming. For people wanting to get the reel out as soon as possible, you want a fast machine. I say this because for the last few years I had a dual core machine that could render but would take 24+ hours to render a sequence and mid way it shuts down, probably due to over heating (never really figured out the problem). Now I’ve upgraded to a new i7 and everything is working now, and renders of the same scene only takes a couple of hours. I guess my point is, having powerful hardware has it’s merits even for beginners and you know it will work.
Sorry for going off topic, anyways can someone enlighten me on the subject of Quadros being able to display 3D correctly, accurately and have the right drives for 3D work? Is that a myth? I believe that’s the main reason for opting for Quadros over GTX but is it true?
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