Best Graphics Card for ACAD software

[Anonymous]

Hi there, could some one tell me what brand and/or model of a graphics card is the BEST for Autodesk software? More compatible and has almost all supported features and is recommended by Autodesk! I'm asking this because I'm going to build a new machine for one of my costumer and he wants to have the best of Autodesk software. He does not care about the pricing of the product just want the best of the best so if some one could tell me I will really appreciate it. I'm looking for Nvidia and AMD products because of gaming and software support. I know gaming cards for Autodesk software does not means they have all supported features! Would really like if a Autodesk representative answers this to me.


Thanks
-------
Juan M. Rodríguez Rebollo

[Anonymous]

I did not do any formal benchmarking but I see no major differences between
the following which I have all in Core i7 boxes with 6 gig of ram the same
Asus MB, Vista 64 & C3D 2010.

Quadro Fx 1700
Radeon 4870
Geforce GTX 9800+
Geforce GTS 250

John

"Joel" wrote in message
news:6213370@discussion.autodesk.com...
I higher end GPU should theoretically give you better realtime graphics such
as 3d-orbit stuff. But how much better? I don't know.

No one's done a real comparison of all these incrementally better cards to
know what the real difference will be in something like AutoCAD. No one's
even done a comparison of the GeForce to the Quatros for that matter. What
we talk about here is more along the lines of experience.

Games? Sure. There are a ton of sites that compare all these slightly
different cards with their .5 second differences in framerates. But that
doesn't neccessarily translate the same way in AutoCAD. The graphics
pipeline is used differently.

[ToanDN]

From my limited knowledge with PC hardware, I don't think the entire amount of video RAM can be used for raster graphic unless the software support it. Heard the latest version of PhotoShop can take advantage of it but not AutoCAD.

Normally, a very small protion of video RAM is used for screen display. Say your screen is 1600x1200 so it uses about 2MB of video RAM. Most of the video RAM will be use for 3D textureing (think SHADE in AutoCAD, or 3D game) so it will help in case you are orbiting a 3D large model full of textures in AutoCAD. So in your case, I doubt any video card will help, even the most expensive OpenGLs.

If you can tell me the size of the image in pixels I can elaborate why adding more RAM may help.

[Anonymous]

For example, one drawing file has four 183 MB TIF images that are 8000 x
8000 pixels each. My screen resolution on the new computer's 24" widescreen
monitor is 1960 x 1020.

Brad
C3D 2010, LT 2010
Vista Business 64, XP Pro

wrote in message news:6213882@discussion.autodesk.com...
From my limited knowledge with PC hardware, I don't think the entire amount
of video RAM can be used for raster graphic unless the software support it.
Heard the latest version of PhotoShop can take advantage of it but not
AutoCAD.

Normally, a very small protion of video RAM is used for screen display. Say
your screen is 1600x1200 so it uses about 2MB of video RAM. Most of the
video RAM will be use for 3D textureing (think SHADE in AutoCAD, or 3D game)
so it will help in case you are orbiting a 3D large model full of textures
in AutoCAD. So in your case, I doubt any video card will help, even the most
expensive OpenGLs.

If you can tell me the size of the image in pixels I can elaborate why
adding more RAM may help.

[ToanDN]

OK I thought you had 200MB JPEGs which can be huge, dimension wise. But you actually working with TIFF and a 8000x8000 which is 192Mb uncompressed and I am unable to explain why it's slow in ACAD. I am throwing a wild guess that the program is not designed to handle raster image that big. I work with images similar in dimensions in PhotoShop and it's not that bad as in ACAD.

[Anonymous]

Yeah, I thought they were jpegs since we work with them too. It just
depends on the source. Does anyone know if working with Raster Design would
help the speed. Right now we just use the plain AutoCAD imageattach
command.

Brad
C3D 2010, LT 2010
Vista Business 64, XP Pro

wrote in message news:6214296@discussion.autodesk.com...
OK I thought you had 200MB JPEGs which can be huge, dimension wise. But you
actually working with TIFF and a 8000x8000 which is 192Mb uncompressed and I
am unable to explain why it's slow in ACAD. I am throwing a wild guess that
the program is not designed to handle raster image that big. I work with
images similar in dimensions in PhotoShop and it's not that bad as in ACAD.

[sgrinavi]

My experience with the low to mid range quadros is the same as everyone elses here; a good gamer card will work fine for 99% of your modeling. I have recently been lucky enough to aquire a ATI V8700 and a Quadro FX 4800.

There is a difference in the higher end cards. The ATI is better than a GTX280 or HD4890 (yes, I have tried them both) in all aspects of CAD, how much better depends on the complexity of your model, as it grows so does the difference in the cards, where the ATI product really shines is in 3dsMax, just amazing how smooth and accurate the shaded 3d viewports are.

The Nvida card is all that and much more. The AutoCAD 2010 performance in any mode with very large and complex models is astonishing, smooth as silk in all 3d modes, beautiful tranparancies. In 3dsMAX the performance again outshines the ATI product, although the difference is not as significant.

I do believe that the workstation class cards have better drivers which contributes to improved stabilty. My Quadro and FirePro never crash where as my gamer cards did, not very often, but enough to make it a PITA. As for the softmod alternative, again, it does help, but are even less stable than the geforce drivers and ATI cats...


Current System Spec

W3520 @ 4'035 GHz - Rampage 2 Extreme
XIGMATEK HDT-S1283 - 12GB Gskill DDR3-1600
2x Vertex 120 @ RAID0 - 4x WD6400AAKS @ RAID 0+1
Nvidia Quadro FX4800 + 9800 GT dedicated PhysX Card
BFG ES 800 - WIN7x64

[Anonymous]

I learned more in 2 min than 4 hours hardware research, thank god for forums(or was that the Romans). I used to use an old Dell laptop as my main workhorse; it had a 1.3 P2, 1GB ram, on board ATI graphics, XP32 chop chop, and AutoCAD 2004-2007 worked flawlessly (pushing the envelope back then) for complex 3D parts rendering for machine prototyping until I reached the 8MB file size, ah the days of off the shelf hardware. When 2008 hit, the laptop was dead and I had to move on, switched to affordable duel core, vista 32, 128MB DDR2 Nvidia 7000something, 4GB DDR2 RAM and functionally I took a 80% paycut because it was like working underwater, in molasses, and I'm sure I aged 10 years and put on 20lbs snacking while waiting for 3D Orbit to rotate the part. Autodesk resellers used to give me that deer in the headlights look when I would ask for the "real" hardware requirements for 3D rendering, of course I never had the $6k budget for a pc in 2006, still don't.

Now it looks like there may be hope once again in building my new work station for under $3k. Thanks for warning me off of SLI I almost made a $700 blunder. I understand the difference between ATI and Nvida is mostly architectural and though the stat sheets for a GTX look poor compared to Radeon HD (as in stream processors 200 vs 800(2)) in performance testing the benchmarks don't show dramatic difference,s at least when you consider one is half the price of the other. At this point however I will defer to those with actual acad experience.

To my question: please advise on which card goes best with 2010 and system...Vista or 7 64bit , Intel Core 2 Quad, 8-12GB DDR2 800 RAM,

Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB 512-bit GDDR5 $300,
or GeForce GTX 285 1GB 512-bit DDR3 $300 Edited by: sw3dp on Jul 16, 2009 1:36 PM

[sgrinavi]

The x2 is a cross fire card, stay away from that. Between the two cards you have presented the 285 is a better choice, The ATI 4890 is just a good and less expensive.


FWIW - If I were going to spend 3k on a system right now it would be a Win 7 box with Asus WS board with the W3520 processor, 12 GB of DDR3-1600 RAM, an Intel SSD for my OS & Apps with a pair of RAID 1 TB WD blacks for my data. The video card would be a workstation class card, probably a FirePRO v8700, you can get them for $600ish on ebay these days.

[Anonymous]

The 4870 x2 is crossfire in 1 slot. The x2 means 2 gpu's working
together on 1 board. I know nothing about the 2 boards otherwise, but I
suspect that the second gpu will never be used by acad.

sw3dp wrote:
> I learned more in 2 min than 4 hours hardware research, thank god for forums(or was that the Romans). I used to use an old Dell laptop as my main workhorse; it had a 1.3 P2, 1GB ram, on board ATI graphics, XP32 chop chop, and AutoCAD 2004-2007 worked flawlessly (pushing the envelope back then) for complex 3D parts rendering for machine prototyping until I reached the 8MB file size, ah the days of off the shelf hardware. When 2008 hit, the laptop was dead and I had to move on, switched to affordable duel core, vista 32, 128MB DDR2 Nvidia 7000something, 4GB DDR2 RAM and functionally I took a 80% paycut because it was like working underwater, in molasses, and I'm sure I aged 10 years and put on 20lbs snacking while waiting for 3D Orbit to rotate the part. Autodesk resellers used to give me that deer in the headlights look when I would ask for the "real" hardware requirements for 3D rendering, of course I never had the $6k budget for a pc in 2006, still don't.
>
> Now it looks like there may be hope once again in building my new work station for under $3k. Thanks for warning me off of SLI I almost made a $700 blunder. I understand the difference between ATI and Nvida is mostly architectural and though the stat sheets for a GTX look poor compared to Radeon HD (as in stream processors 200 vs 800(2)) in performance testing the benchmarks don't show dramatic difference,s at least when you consider one is half the price of the other. At this point however I will defer to those with actual acad experience.
>
> To my question: please advise on which card goes best with 2010 and system...Vista or 7 64bit , Intel Core 2 Quad, 8-12GB DDR2 800 RAM,
>
> Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB 512-bit GDDR5 $300,
> or GeForce GTX 285 1GB 512-bit DDR3 $300
>
> Edited by: sw3dp on Jul 16, 2009 1:36 PM