topic Re: How Many GB for a Graphics Card Required to Run 3 D Max in 3ds Max Forum

How Many GB for a Graphics Card Required to Run 3 D Max

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 13:39:28 GMT

Good Morning @Alfred.DeFlaminiseFlaminis

I am hoping for a little help here....I am working with a school that will be using 3 D Max program on a Dell Workstation T3610 and we are trying to determine if a Quadro 2000 Graphics Card will work, even though it is only 1GB graphics card? I am trying to save the school money by not going to a 4Gb or 8Gb card, but I want to make sure a 1GB card will work??

Also I was reading various Forums and I see many post regarding the 1060 graphics that people are using. I don't see that one recommended by Autodesk??

Any help or recommendations?

Thank you in advance @Alfred.DeFlaminiseFlaminis

Patrick

Re: How Many GB for a Graphics Card Required to Run 3 D Max

Alfred.DeFlaminis — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 18:07:19 GMT

Hello @Anonymous and welcome to the community,

I have a link here that has info about supported cards per version of 3ds Max. The Quadro 2000 is technically supported in 2017. The 2018 cert results aren't in yet, but I'd imagine they'll be largely the same. So I think you are ok to use it for these purposes. Is this is a public school or a college? If it's a college, at some point the users will likely get scenes too heavy for it, but for high school or middle school classes this should be just fine.

In a technical sense Max isn't built for gaming cards. They work but Max isn't developed for them. That being said, the 1080's are the closest to professional cards and are the only ones tested. The Max KDE Jon Bell sits next to me and has Max running off a 1070 at home and my wife has a 1060 and it's working out for her. However the only cards tested were the 1080's. Does that help? Please let me know if you have any questions, and don't forget you can demo the product for 30 days which may give you a baseline to test from.

Please hit the "Accept as Solution" button if my post solves your issue or answers your question. This lets me know that I was effective in helping you, and thank you for doing so.

Best Regards,

Re: How Many GB for a Graphics Card Required to Run 3 D Max

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 18:11:20 GMT

You are so great!
Yes it is for a highschool. So really it doesn't matter if the graphic card is 1GB, 2Gb, 4Gb or 8Gb?

Re: How Many GB for a Graphics Card Required to Run 3 D Max

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 18:48:05 GMT

I can confirm that the 1080 works fine with MAX. I've been using it for 4 months and haven't had any issues.

Re: How Many GB for a Graphics Card Required to Run 3 D Max

Alfred.DeFlaminis — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 22:48:39 GMT

Hello @Anonymous,

For heavy scenes it can matter, but for high school kids I think it's fine. If they start to bog the scenes down, maybe tell them a bit about using turbosmooths on render iterations instead of viewport iterations, the benefits of layer management, display as box, etc. When I was a college instructor (for about 10 years) I always stressed scene management as being important in my classes. There was often 1 kid who had a great computer at home, maxxed out his scene size because 'who cares?' and then couldn't render his project and he failed the class. On some level having such advanced hardware offered those students a false sense of security. For basic intro to Max stuff, I think you'll be fine with 1GB. (Still, try a demo to be sure.)

There are benefits to having more RAM, but those benefits are probably not easily realized by beginners. Maybe show them a low res character model with textures to show how texture details can be more important than sheer poly counts. If there is a lot of lighting/rendering in your curriculum, maybe provide them with a scene that has a lot of those settings already refined so they can just have fun with it and not worry about subdivs, sampling, and render optimization. Should work out. 🙂

Best Regards,

Re: How Many GB for a Graphics Card Required to Run 3 D Max

Alfred.DeFlaminis — Thu, 29 Jun 2017 17:43:44 GMT

Hello @Anonymous,

I just wanted to follow up here, did you get a chance to try a demo version on one of those machines?

Best Regards,

Re: How Many GB for a Graphics Card Required to Run 3 D Max

Anonymous — Thu, 29 Jun 2017 18:10:04 GMT

Not yet, I don't get the machines for a few weeks, trying to figure out the graphics cards. They are coming in with 1 GB cards so I will try the demo version of 3 D Max and see if not I will have to upgrade the cards. I was using this link but it just specify how GB the cards need to be
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/syscert/system?siteID=123112&catID=18254205&id=18844534&product=132&os=8192&system=150

Re: How Many GB for a Graphics Card Required to Run 3 D Max

Alfred.DeFlaminis — Thu, 29 Jun 2017 18:43:52 GMT

Fair enough @Anonymous. If you are on 2016 you are in even better shape with 1GB. In 2017+ the GPU is used a lot more than in versions prior. When the time comes, please let me know how it goes! Thanks for the update.

Best Regards,

Re: How Many GB for a Graphics Card Required to Run 3 D Max

Anonymous — Mon, 24 Jul 2017 13:40:54 GMT

Hello Mr. DeFlaminis,

Thanks so much for your help so far! I was speaking with my school and he is thinking of purchasing Dell T3610. Now my question would be the graphics cards that are coming with them are GE Force 780 TI. I don't think these are good enough for 3D Max(??) but I can help the school out and install GF106GL -Quadro 2000, would these be better?

Dell Precision T3610 bought in 2014:

Intel Xeon E5 1650 v2 3.5GHz 6 core

Intel C602 Chipset

8 x 8GB 1866 MHz DDR3 ECC

1 x 512GB SSD system drive

2 x 2TB HDD RAID 0 data drive

685W PSU

Cheers

Patrick

Re: How Many GB for a Graphics Card Required to Run 3 D Max

Alfred.DeFlaminis — Mon, 24 Jul 2017 23:13:44 GMT

Hello @Anonymous,

I have to carefully step around the kinds of questions that say "Will X be better than Y." I'm not in a good position to be able to answer that for sure, but for high school kids I think a 780 should be fine. If they overload a scene you can teach a bit about proper scene management if needed, might help develop appreciation for the art of scene management which is almost a lost art these days. For 2017 the beginning of the certified model numbers are the 465's so the 780's are comfortably in the middle and therefore should be fine for beginning users.

Having done IT for a school district outside of Philly for a number of years, I know how hard budget is to come by in these schools these days. My gut instinct is to always go for the cheaper option and upgrade only if necessary. That being said, you might ask in some other places since I have that attitude. My car is 20 years old, the jacket I wear I've been wearing for 24 years, I have my original Gameboy. In other words; I'm kind of cheap and I hold on to things as long as I can. You might google "780 TI vs. Quadro 2000" and see if someone has done a comparison with those two models. From what I'm seeing, the 780 seems to rate higher on some of those links, but I can't officially suggest either one of them over the other based on internal policies.

Which ever card you choose, your students are lucky to have a teacher who cares this much about them. I salute you.

Best Regards,