nVidia Quadro or Quadro K Class?

[JayBass]

Hi all, sorry about this but I am new and have searched the net for an answer and not found what I am looking for. I am new to 3D design and animation. In starting off I was advised to make choices regarding modeling, animation, rendering and compositing environments. So I chose Zbrush and Maya based on professional feedback. As for compositing I have not yet desided.

My problem also is cash outlay for a good workstation get high so midrange is where I have had to go. At this point I have come to a realisation that my SLI gaming 3D setup is inadequit and that adding a quadro card to my rig would benefit me in my now and future work.

Quadro or K Quadro class card? Pricing wise I can afford a Quadro 4000 or a Quadro K2000, But I cant seem to find a result that lends to me making a desition on what generation type I should go for.
Quadro 4000 has more GPU grunt than the K2000 but lacks the CUDA's that the K2000 offers. Are these factores really importaqnt and am I asking the right questions regarding the choice factors? Or should I be looking at going GTX route?

Its urgent that I make this desition now and purchase the card before the worlds currency reevalutions happen and prices double.

[JayBass]

Also I did not mention but my work is character and scene creation and annimation for adverts and movie industries.

Rendering will be on Vray, Mantalray, SolidAngle Arnald and Houdini FX

[Anifex09]

One of the biggest bottle necks to Graphic performance is Bandwidth the Quadro K has slower memory speed and processing speed but has more bandwidth so it should out perform the Quadro.

[JayBass]

Quadro 4000: CUDA's 256, 2Gb GDDR5, MEM Band 256-bit 89.6 Gb/s

Quadro K2000: CUDA's 384, 2GB GDDR5, MEM Band 128Bit 64 GB/s

I don't see where it has more band? Just seems to have more CUDA's.
And are CUDA's more important?

Power consumption is not an issue to me, as I have a 1000W psw. I have an i7 extreme edition 3.47 hexa core cpu and 12 gigs of DDR3 2200+ ram which I will be upgrading to 32.

[Anifex09]

you have to compare card for card K5000 to the 5000. The bandwidth is more for the Kepler in comparison to its copartner.

[JayBass]

Thanks for the advise. After searching extensively. It seems that going for a 780GTX would benifit me more. Even for OPENGL based rendering work its acceptable compaired against the K4000. I am creating entertainment media, dont realy need the presision of the Quado kepler. 

Once again, thank you 🙂

[Anifex09 · Accepted solution]

I agree.  The only real advantage to the Quadro Card is that it can be paired with a Tesla Card.  The K Class is very expensive investment when you pair it the the Tesla.  No real benefits for Maya, but does work quite well with programs like Nuke.  Have you given much thought to the Titan?  I know it is rather expensive but is capable of Floating Point Calculations.   I tested Maya out on a workstation that used the Titan and the performance was quite impressive.   

[JayBass]

Once I can take my current skill level and grow it to an acceptable level, I will build myself a Maximus rig with some Xeon E7v2's, Tesla and Quadro K6000. But as a class myself a student, justifying the money to the Mrs to get myself the machine I really want now will be a tough pill to swallow 🙂

Was going to get the TITAN but opted for the TI card and new system SSD drive as my os drive is still SATA HDD. Get my stock tomorrow.

Any good 3D scenes you can recommend for benching the card with? I have been given IDST as a resource, was told that the higher poly scenes with full GI + will be a good bench. Some users running Dual Quadro 6000's have report good results at around 10 hours at high res. LOL I will be waiting days for those test to see an end 🙂

[JayBass]

Although mind you, it is good to do a long hall test to make sure the card is stable so I don't loose work later down the line when I have 34 hour + renders to do.

[Anifex09]

I am sure you do realize that most of the Render Engines you specified are CPU only Arnold - Mental Ray - Houdini Mantra. If your intent is to build a how powered CPU based Render Engine I can help point you in the right direction.

[JayBass]

Anifex you are a fountain of information and a welcome source of experience. Any help from you is a welcome one. I have managed to get myself to I think a general understanding of V-Ray through various tutorials. And working at learning the Mental Ray engine at the moment. I have the students lic version of Houdini ( Got this as it also seems to be a widely used industry standard for television advertising and movie production rendering. I have not even looked at it yet or gone through any of its tutorials and it looks quite complicated given all the physics features it supports. My introduction to 3D design started of with basic sculpting using Z-Brush and my current and first project is organic and the object : A Female Human Anatomy with Super Hero Physique. I am at the point where I want to do photo realistic skin and hair still frame render of her. And have been doing some searching as to which of the engines gives to most superior result. Problem here is that communities from all of the different engines all swear that their chosen engine is the best lol. I am a qualified graphics designer and have been working in the industry for a long time so 2D space I am proficient in.... Also a qualified MS systems developer so I am not scared of any script based languages any of the engines might use. Just have to familiarise myself with the syntax and basic API usage.

Other than Z-Brush and Maya I have absolutly no preference or experience so I am not partial to anything. Tampered with Mudbox a bit.

MY Rig is a i7990X, GA-x58-UD3r, 12 Gig Ram, 2 X Nvidia 460SE, 1 X Nvidia 780 Ti GHz OC ed plenty HDD space and system drive now upgraded to SSD. About to install os, should I stick to win7 Ult 64Bit or go 8.1 64Bit?

Sorry for the multiple edits, seems to be getting long winded.

Though a bit of a background might assist you in assisting me, lol

Thanx mate 🙂

[Anifex09]

As far as render engines go when doing Human like Characters VRAY 3.0 for maya offers a new SSS Material shader that is at the moment the fastest Skin - Sub Surface Scattering tool out their. I recently moved from Mental Ray (free) to Arnold. This render engine is by far one of easiest and most reliable render engines on the market. The IPR render in maya allows you to quickly make adjustments to your samples, lights and materials with quick visual feedback (has never crashed even when working on scenes that contained millions of objects with 100s of millions of faces). The skin shader is fast and very realistic. The company offers a tremendous amount of information on materials, sample material downloads, downloadable projects, video tutorials, and a wealth of knowledge from large studios that use Arnold on a day to day bases. As you began to explore different types of render engines and most importantly start to animate you will find many annoying work arounds when using render engines that cache the light data (Mental Ray, VRay, Mantra). Arnold is the only one that computes all of the data at once no light cache (Final Gather or Photons) no more Photon crawling in your scene or getting trapped in a corner. With all of this said VRay is a fast growing and quite powerful render engine as well. The things you want to look for is a render engine is what it supports (Particles, Volumetric Fluid, Hair, Fur, File Formates (Like DEEP EXR), Memory management (Proxy, Alembic and GPU Cache),Maya XGEN)) all of these things are supported with Arnold and VRAY 3.0

[JayBass]

I guess you are right, I will use both of them. I had a good look at Maxwell and its unbiased engine. So many of the qualities attracted me to it. But after doing some more in depth investigation I have learnt that going totally unbiased route is not the most efficient way of achieving believable results. All be it unbiased results are more accurate in most cases the accuracy is not even noticeable unless you are looking for it. Render times are extreme and it seems that Arnold and V-Ray have carefully customised their engines to use unbiased where it really counts and biased where it doesn't and thus achieve excellent results in a fraction of the time using far less overhead.

What I am looking for though is an engine that utilises both GPU and CPU rendering based on where ever the work load is less. For example; If I have a render running in the background while modeling in Z-Brush, the engine will use up most of my GPU resources and leave the CPU to the demand of my current task and vise versa. And if idle use maximum CPU and GPU to speed up the render process while supportting distributed computation for multi-core system. What is your spin on this?

I do like the skin sss example pic from the Arnold documentaion. Looks great.

Jamie and the Ten24 team are doing well.

[JayBass]

Have you tried the Reshift3D engine at all?
The open beta is at V1 now and seeing how the developers are customising the engine daily based on registered forum community requests is amasing. This one looks like it might be a future winner. www.redshift3d.com

[Anifex09]

It sounds like you need to build a second computer to act as your mini render farm while you are working. If you want you can try out this render engine (Hybrid GPU and CPU based render engine) https://www.redshift3d.com/products/redshift/