Video Card recommendations
 

Okay, I've googled this to death and thought it's time to ask on here:

I work for a multi-media company that does primarily Flash stuff. I've pushed them to purchase Maya 8.5, which they did last summer, and we've been gaining momentum with 3D projects.

It's still not our primary focus, and they don't want to dump a ton on upgrading my hardware, so here's my question. I've been having some performance issues on texture-intensive projects, especially using paint effects for environmental stuff like grass, foliage, etc. My computer runs awesome but has a low-end video card, and we checked the performance and when Maya was running chunky, the performance with everything else was still pretty good. I've read that Maya relies heavily on the video card.

The boss is ready to spend some money on a better video card but not on the machine. Probably not more than $700-$800 to get me a good video card. After everything I've looked at and read about, it seems like in that price range the NVIDIA GEFORCE 8800 Ultra is the best balance of what we want for the price we want.

Any recommendations here? Feedback on this or other video cards that would fit what we're looking for? Is there another one I should consider? Basically he's letting me and our IT guy get whatever we want after we research it, as long as it's not more than like $700. What are your thoughts?

From what I understand maya only supports the quadro series from nvidia and a few ATI cards, I'm running a quadro fx4500, and I've got no complaints so far.

Thanks for the heads up!

So I'm getting the feeling that the GeForce series is more for gaming and the Quaddro series is more for production, is that a fair generalization?

Yes, the GeForce is more for DirectX and the the Quaddro is more for OpenGL. Maya doesn't officially support the GeForce, but many people use it without any problems, although its kinda risky to try. The Quaddro is the best for guaranteed reliability, but is far more expensive and offers less performance and features, unless you are willing to spend thousands on the best model.

Hi,

I use a Geforce 8800 GTX 768Mb card with Maya 2008.
It runs perfectly fine, I have a quardo fx 3400 on my other machine running Maya 6, but this runs better. The only thing I have noticed is it's slightly slower when selecting meshes, although this is only noticeable if you have smooth preview activated.

I can't comment on Maya 8.5 however but I have the overall opinion that the workstation grade Quadro's are over rated and offer poor value for money.

That's my experiences and opinion anyway

Gio

Beware of the Nvidia 8 series though, i have one myself and have had some small minor problems with Maya 8.5 though is easily fixed(atleast most) with installing the new drivers or turning on AA to 4x i think.

My two cents anyway,

I know very little about video cards. So i wanted to know if the 8600 and 8500 Geforce Video cards are good enough for Maya 2009. I'm really hard pressed on cash and I can barely afford to spends hundreds of dollars right now.

Thank you

If anyone has any suggestions on anything that costs less than 200 dollars I would greatly appreciate it.

I'm just tired of getting the grey screen of death. Which all it does is zoom the camera out so far that you can't see the objects. However trying to zoom in using orthographic view doesn't seem to work, but zooming in using perspective view works great...until you have to switch out and switch back in. Then you have to zoom back in again.

There is no need to get a new graphics card to "fix" that becuase its a feature! :)

Just change your clip plane to a larger value.

Btw, this thread is nearly one year old! :eek:

Ah nice. I thought it was a graphics problem. I still need a video card though. I mean I'm using a 5 year old graphics controller. But getting a decent video card would mean upgrading my motherboard as well which probably means upgrading almost my entire cpu. Sounds like fun, and expensive. However I did hear about a PCI card that will allow me to use a PCI video card on a AGP motherboard. I was going to look that up today, but if anyone has any suggestions, I'll appreciate it.

Had not noticed D:

Well, there is this article from 2005:

http://www.behardware.com/news/7548/...e-adapter.html


The article says it all - there isn't much point in using one, I'm afraid...

I guess until Ge-force 6 you could do a full MOD to a quadro. With ge force 8 you still can do a soft mod to a equivalent quadro using riva-tuner, but it won't be 100% like a quadro. From what i've seen the softmod on ge forces from series 8 would only gain performance with the custom drivers for 3d studio max...

By the way, the hardware is identical on a ge force or a quadro, the only difference is that on a ge force the professional functions are disabled at the drivers and some also are in the GPU.