I am building a new computer to be used for 3D graphic. I will mainly use Max, photoshop, Coreldraw and combustion on it. I have done quite a lot of looking into this and so far have only confused myself further. Firstly my budget is only £330 pounds so there is no way I am looking at any top end pro cards. They are just way too expensive. I have heard that ATI driver can cause many problems with pro graphics apps. Is this true? The only pro cards I can afford are the very bottom of the range ones ie. quadro FX500. These are similar in price to the top end game cards. Will these low end pro cards really out perform a top end game cards? Any help would be much appreciated cheers mik
In the past, ATi's drivers were craptacular at best, but they have come a long way. I've not had problems using Photoshop with my Radeon 8500. As for 3DS max, I'm not quite sure. You might see what 3DLabs has in your price range as they target pro graphics stuff, but that still may be pretty pricey. If you want to do some gaming as well as graphics, I'd definitely go with ATi. If it's graphics only, 3DLabs or Matrox would be your cup of tea.
Cool thanks a lot for your reply. I'll have a look at those two places. It's mainly graphic I want it for but I might play some games. Are pro cards really that bad for games? Is that a directX thing?
No, but they're geared more toward professional apps first and foremost, especially Matrox and 3DLabs. ATi and nVidia change a few things on their mainstream cards for pro use and then jack the price up. Direct X has nothing to do with that. The Quadro FX and FireGL cards from nVidia and ATi have DX8 hardware (well DX9 for ATi, nVidia messed up their implementation of DX9). If you're wanting to play Doom 3 and the like at a decent resolution, then I would stay away from Matrox and 3DLabs since they don't cater to the gaming crew anymore (unless you wanna fork over for the Parhelia, which the gaming performance is equal to a GeForce 3).
