thanulee, if you own ati 4870 you have the maximum fps in viewports that 3d studio Max up to 2012 can utilize. If you want more fps, get faster CPU. All added GPU power will be wasted for Max viewports.
Getting quadro 600 will lower your viewport fps by 20-30%. However, you will be able to use it in both iray rendering and Adobe Premiere CS5 since it is an nivida card.
However, if you care about Premiere, you should get decent card like gtx 560. Refer to
this site to find our what GPU's are actually supported and why.
If you care about iray (you do arch viz previews), you should consider getting gtx 580 with 3gb of ram. Iray uses all available GPU cores (unlike Max/Premiere), and needs video ram for same reason regular scenes need regular ram. If you do high resolution rendering 2k+ with multi milion poly scenes, you should get a real quadro card since they have a lot of ram. Quadro 6000 with 6gb of ram is the only version worth above gtx 580.
Two things to look out for:
1) You really should try to use Premiere cs5 right now, and decide if you need more speed. Its pretty snappy even without a cuda capable card on a modern quad core system.
2) While here, you should also try iray, as it is now. It has many many many limitations, so you might find yourself not using it at all.
If both 1 and 2 are true for you, getting an upgrade for ati 4870 will serve no noticeable purpose if you don play games as well. Gtx 560 is about 2x faster than 4780 so games will play noticeably faster. (only true if you game in full HD or higher)
Im using mental ray and i ll be using Vray soon. What do i have to consider? |
Mental ray cares only about your CPU. Get as fast one as you can get. Dont run out of ram. Render.
Try vray. Pick the better renderer for you. Render. Good luck
🙂