Nitrous, direct 3d or OpenGL as display driver?

[Anonymous]

I have an Nvidia Geforce GTX 660 OC version from Gigabyte. I saw the nitrous is the default one? Can someine explain me why is this the best choice?

[Anonymous]

what are your system specs?

[Anonymous]

I'd love to know the answer for this question too.

However, I have a AMD Radeon HD 7770 and AMD FX-8150 (eight cores supposedly) with 8 GB RAM and after tried Nitrous, Direct3d and OpenGL I came to the conclusion that Nitrous is the fastest (more frames p/second, better accuracy displaying lines, grids, textures) Direct3d almost perform the same as nitrous, but it have lower FPS and I notice sometimes there are display glitches like lines not showing when full zooming in certain areas. Although my guess is that this can be improved by the drivers supplied by the vendor (in my case AMD) but as far as I noticed, they gave much more attention to the last generation video games than anything else, so I'm kinda lose hope on this.
OpenGL is the slowest (talking about FPS) and I've heard that it's pretty much obsolete and Autodesk hasn't change/improved anything on it for years. Some people claim this is the choice only if you have an older video card.

From my very limited knowledge, this is not an easy topic, as many variables are involved like customizing setting for viewports, video card drivers, system specs... but if any one of the masters in 3ds Max could answer this, we will be grateful.

[Anonymous]

I think I can help, first each driver has its pros and cons, Nitrous is better when you're lighting a scene, Direct3D is much better when you're modeling or doing layout of many objects, believe me it is much FASTER than nitrous, and finally the old and good OpenGL the FASTER when you are animating characters, you can animate easily 5 characters of 20k polys in real time (+30fps), but be aware that it is slower than Nitrous and Direct3D to handle scenes with millions of polygons, anyway the 3ds max 2013 is the slowest of all 3ds max to handle deformable meshes.
Hope that helps.

[spacefrog_]

you might re-validate your experiences with Nitrous in Max 2014

[Anonymous]

my video card http://www.gigabyte.com.ro/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4361#ov
my processor http://ark.intel.com/products/69114/Intel-Core-i5-3350P-Processor-6M-Cache-up-to-3_30-GHz
windows 8 64 bits
8GB DDR3


damn Im really confused now after I saw the lates replies

[spacefrog_]

Stick with Nitrous. When you run in situations where you got display problems, switch over to DirectX. Never ever switch back to OpenGL, the OGL driver is a dying driver in 3ds Max.

Create two shortcuts for 3ds Max , one which launches Max in Nitrous mode (3dsmax.exe -vx ), and one for the Direct3D mode (3dsmax.exe -vd ). But try to learn the ins and outs of Nitrous. It's a relatively new tech, it likes to be treated differently. Of course D3D requires special treatment too, like never activate BF culling when you want high wireframe performance.

The question of either D3D or Nitrous is more a question of the work you do than what's your hardware. Nitrous in Max 2013 still has some limitations and quirks, but as i said, Max 2014 brought a tremendous boost in that regard...

So start out with Nitrous, when you hit some problems, post on the forums about them, most of the time they can be solved. If not switch over to D3D, there is no drawback with that dual shortcut strategy i mentioned above...

[Anonymous]

ok Ill do that. Very big thank you