Need hardware advice, limited budget rendering pc

[Anonymous]

Greetings everyone,

as the title says I'm facing with limited budget and I'd appreciate if someone with more experiece could advise me with my problems. I'm somewhat familiar with Showcase but nothing fancy and I have read a lot of info about the program itself plus experiences of other people. Now, I didn't read anywhere how gaming grade GPUs perform in Showcase RayTracing. I don't have money for Quadro or FirePro so I have to take either Radeon or GeForce. Sure, bigger numbers mean higher performance but I don't want to give 300 euros on a GPU if a 150e one can do fairly good with medium complex architectural models. And that is my question: How good is a gaming grade GPU in Showcase and if you were in my situation which one would you choose in these price ranges: up to 200 euros and up to 300 euros?

Thanks a bunch to everyone in advance.

[MarionLandry]

Hi,

You need to understand that gaming GPU are optimized towards gaming needs while Quadro Cards for example are optimized for 3d applications.. These appeared to be the same but are completely different needs. I have in the past work with Gaming cards and they are certainly not designed to render 3d scenes for days.. consequently, they will over heat easily.. In my experience, they were noisy and would become really HOT to the point I had to shut my computer down after 24 hours of rendering to let everything cool down. I had two GeForce in bridge. I would really recommend a proper GPU that is designed to work and render for days without a break. Have a look at the video comparison I have created on NVIDIA cards. It might help you make a decision. Investing in a good graphic card will make a HUGE difference in your day to day workflow. It will allow you to work faster and deliver your final image on time without worrying about over heating problems.. http://youtu.be/zjof3Cpenbg and http://youtu.be/S-S2JXKE6vA

Marion

[cikho]

hi marion, sorry for the quick off topic, but can you ask someone to check for the nvidia 320.18 drivers for common geforce cards?
it makes SC crash at startup and it's quite annoying..

i understand autodesk mainly supports quadro drivers, but i guess most of us young or students don't have a quadro on his laptop.. one day maybe 😄

[MarionLandry]

Check for what? I am sorry I can't offer NVIDIA supports, it's out of my knowledge. You should reach out directly to NVIDIA. Marion

[Anonymous]

Hello Marion I appreciate your replay and technical info. Some things are much more clear for me now and I'll see if I can save up some more money for the K series quadro card. Again, thanks a lot.

[cikho]

@marion

yes i understand that, i just thought you knew someone in the programming area who could poke those nvidia programmers and just tell them "hey your latest driver screwed up our program" 😛

i, as a customer, can surely poke nvidia and tell them "my showcase doesn't work", but i'm pretty sure that having someone from autodesk (which is not a small company obviously) calling them will make things work faster.. something like "solve the problem or you're fired, world is full of stupid driver programming expertise" 😄

lol i'm just kidding, but, being serious, is it possible to have this kind of support from autodesk with common nvidia drivers or is expected to work with quadro only? what's the fastest way? because i sent vaious crash reports without recieving any answer.. right now i could only switch back to the previous driver

[falkmassmann]

I´m not sure if I can give further help on the issue but I will try to give you my experience on the topic.

Showcase uses 2 modes for visual output:

1. Hardware Rendering:

In this case all visual processing is done by the graphics card. Of course other tasks like pulling

around geometry and such are processed by the processor.

But visual display output is handled by GPU.

2. Raytracing:

All raytracing is done by the processor (CPU) i.e. your GPU is twiddling thumbs and get´s bored.

I´m not 100% sure but I believe Showcase doesn´t support partial raytracing on GPU with GPGPU like 3dsMax can.

I´m using a Quadro 4000 at work and have a GTX 670 at home. Performance wise they are on par, I couldn´t tell any difference on fps between the 2 workplaces, CPU´s are pretty much the same i7 3770K and Inel Xeon E5-1620.

If you buy a gaming card make sure it has a proper cooling system with good cooling. On the other hand the Dell T3600 workstation get´s very noisy if I start raytracing.

Cheers

[Anonymous]

Thank you bery much falkmassmann. Being first hand info this is very useful and I appreciate it very much.