Video Card req's (specific: memory, cores, speed?) Whats driving impression

[Anonymous]

Hello,







We've recently begun using impressions in our office to support our autocad files. During the creation of an 'interiors package' we began noticing memory errors when trying to print fullsize 600dpi to our 1050c plotter. The only system that will print these files (and for that matter open and be workable) is an old

Dell Dimension 8400 with P4, 4gigs ram (/3g switch) and Geforce 6800 PCI express x16 256mb card.



We have several Dell precision 380/390s all with Nvidia Quadro cards (ranging from fx550/128mb to fx3400/256mb), 4gigs ram (/3gb switch) and none of them are able to work on these 'interior drawings', nor print them. They all suffer from the: "Error. Impression is running out of video memory and will now close." message.



So, what I'd like to know from Autodesk is what exactly is impression using to 'function' and to 'print'. Is impression loading and constantly using the video card memory to function, and not so much system ram? I've never seen impression get above 400mb on my system task manager. I have plenty left even when the error does occur.



Is there 'specifics' to a video card that are ideal for impression? IE: more video memory size, faster video memory speed, more video memory 'cores' (ie: 16, 32, 128???).



Autodesk recommends the quadro cards, but I have personal experience that the geforce 6xxx series functions better than any of the quadros we have inhouse fx550-3400.



There must be a technical person at Autodesk that can give us some answers to what impression needs 'technically' in a video card to run efficiently with complex impression files.



I've attached snapshot of one of the impression interiors that we have had no joy on printing except for the geforce 6800 (and also absolutely NO program running on windows XP pro 32bit, except basic windows essentials, and impression. I had to kill NAV and all other none essentials to get this to print).



It would be great to get an official answer to some of this from autodesk.



In the meantime I'm tempted to just purchase a 1gb 'basic' geforce 9500gt from newegg for $75 to see if it doesn't suffer from these problems.

[ShanaProd]

The minimal graphics support for Impression is a card that supports Pixel Shader 2 or higher. Your GeForce 6xxx cards should meet that requirement. Here is the full list of reqs rom the product Readme:


Hardware/Software

Requirement

Operating system

Microsoft® Windows VistaTM Home Basic, Home Premium, Ultimate Business, and Enterprise
Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional (SP 2)

Service Pack 2 (SP2) is available at http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsXP/sp2/.

Computer/Processor
Intel® processor, 3.0 GHz or greater.
For laptop computers: AMD® processor 1.7 MHz or greater

RAM
1+ GB

Graphics card
128+ MB DirectX® 9.0c-capable graphics card supporting pixel shader 2.0 or greater (64 MB minimum)

Recommended graphics cards include:

NVIDIA Quadro® FX
NVIDIA GeForce® FX 5, 6 and 7 families (for example, 6600 and 7800)
ATI Radeon® X series (for example, x300, x600, x1300)
ATI Radeon 9500 and later
ATI FireGLTM X and V families (for example, X1, V3200)


Hard disk space
2+ GB (not including installation)

Video display
1280 x 1024 32-bit color video display adapter (true color)

Web browser
Microsoft® Internet Explorer 6.0 (SP1)

[Anonymous]

wrote in message news:...
>Autodesk recommends the quadro cards, but I have
>personal experience that the geforce 6xxx series functions
>better than any of the quadros we have inhouse fx550-3400.

Actually, for Impression, Autodesk recommends the Quadros AND many of the
GeForce 5, 6, 7 and higher cards. And since Impression relies totally on
DirectX, those GeForce cards are the better option because they are
optimized for DirectX. The Quadros, while compatible with DirectX, are not
as optimized for it.

The Quadro-only recommendation is just for the AutoCAD line.

--
Joel