Is this a good budget GPU?

[macuser1298]

I am planning to build a PC for about 1000 dollars.Would the NVIDIA GTX 750 ti be a good GPU for a student learning Maya and Inventor? Or is it worth the extra money to get a higher level card , like the GTX 970 or 980?

Thanks in advance.

[pshwayka]

Your safest bet is to go with something on the Autodesk Certified Hardware list.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/syscert?id=18844534&siteID=123112

[macuser1298]

That list seem outdated, and most are over my budget. The question is , at what price point is the increase in performance not worth spending more?

[dgorsman]

Your budget might be a tad low.  You're going to have to compromise at some point, and your system is only as good as the tighest bottleneck.  In other words, you can't get a kick-*** video card and a pokey i3 processor, or a top-end overclocked i7 processor and "only" 8 GB RAM - everything works together.  Bump it up another $500 or so and get "good but not exceptional" for everything.

For student use the video card should be sufficient.  Don't worry too much about Inventor, as anything that runs Maya well should handle Inventor well too.

"Certification" doesn't cover what would be considered gaming cards, as there are FAR too many different brands and versions of drivers to properly test.

[jbbarnette427]

would try to get the 970 for sure. Also I cannot overstated getting a good CPU. And if you are gonna be doing Sim or dynamics work I would suggest at least 16GB of ram on windows.