i'm looking at uprading my system to an asus motherboard with nforce 590 sli chipset, 2 gb of ddr2 667 ram and amd amd athlon64 am2 x2 4200+ 2.2 ghz 1mb cache. i do a lot of 3d modelling and rendering - what graphics card would compliment this set-up? could you give me a few alternatives at different prices? cheers
Do you play games too? I dont know the lowdown on any of the new cards but if you only need the graphics card for rendering you will probably be better off with a card designed for that alone.
What you want to look at is the 3DLabs Wildcat, nVidia's Quadro, or ATi's FireGL. I don't work with 3D Modeling-specific cards, but this list will give you a price range of what you're looking at. A workstation class video card seems to cost 3-5 times as that of a consumer level card would, so where $200 may buy you a fairly impressive gaming card, you'll probably have to spend $500-700 for a workstation card of the same relative caliber.
I think you mis understood them Willz - if you read their initial post they mention they do lots o 3D Modelling and Rendering, for that a decent workstation card would perform much better.
I'd see how it handles your needs first. If it's working well for you and not slowing you down, then leave it alone. However, if you are finding it to be detrimental to your progress, then lay down the cash for a new card.
Am I out of the loop of is FireGL kind of out of the running now, haven't heard much in terms of updates in that line.
No. ATi's still putting them out, as is nVidia with their Quadro. We don't tend to pay attention since it's not in our area of needs. From what I can tell, the product families will stick to the formula of the power level being pointed out by the numerical value. A FireGL 3300 is going to be slower than a 3800 or so. The FireGL/Quadro series are based on the same architecture as their contemporary Radeon/GeForce designs.
it's possible to mod an x800 pro into a fire gl i belive, and the modded onces perform as god as the real ones, only works with some ATi cards, there is a risk of damagin the card though.
So they're based on the same architecture as the mainstream gaming cards but with a bunch of modifications? They're way more expensive though, do you know what's different about the design that accounts for the price and is suitable for precise calculations with rendering and all?
I modded my card into a quadro once and it didnt make a blindin' bit of difference to renders or games.
seems like it makes a diffo with ATi, you get a loss in gaming performance but better performance for rendering, dunno if it does deffo work, but from the benchmarks i seen once, it seems that it does, i suppose its worth it if it does work, saves a hell of alot of work, and i bet an x800 can be modded into a preety good fire gl.
You'll see a loss in gaming performance because the FireGL/Quadro cards are designed for precision first, speed second. Games are all about speed; modeling is about accuracy.
Not necessarily. That's subjective to the game, resolution, AA and AF settings used. It's not to say it won't do anything, but gaming isn't the target of these workstation cards. Even if they did, I can't see many people plunking down nearly $4k to run two top-end Quadro's in SLI when you can get Quad SLI for a quarter of that.
