rendering cards e.g. 3ds max

[gazzy]

Hey Im looking for a good rendering card for my uni work. I use 3ds max alot and the painful rendering process is annoying.

Can anyone recommend A good card for this job for around the £200 mark.
there are so many and they vary in price so much.

thanks

[Dougal]

ANy of the current 6600 or 6800 reallyy.

Unless you're willing to spend around £500 or more on a firegl you won't get anything better.

[herulach]

6800GT/Ultras can be softmodded to quadros. and should set you back about 200 quid.

[gazzy]

mmmm I'll have to look in to it. How do gaming cards compare to rendering cardsfor rendering out animations? Looking at the spec's of each you would say that gaming cards are superior.

[Stoo]

Pro 3D cards tend to have application specific optimisations, and tend to be more accurate (pretty much essential if you're working in CAD), but neither make rendering quicker, if you want that, then you might want to look at the artVPS render accelerators - http://www.artvps.com/products.ihtml?page=overview

[Xenctuary]

I haven't used 3DS Max for a while, but does it not come with Backburner? I'm sure you can use this to utilise a seperate PC's processing power to speed up the render process. Then again, I could be totally wrong?

[nichomach]

You're absolutely right, Xenctuary; we use Backburner with an ART PURE card in a separate PC. That said, I think you can use any machine as your render box, it's just that the PURE's designed for it. And it's a wee bit more than a 6800GT .

[gazzy]

thanks for the backburner tip.

Its just when i use mental ray rendering when i get inpatient and have to wait forever.

[nichomach]

Backburner's your puppy then; just chuck it on a second machine that you don't mind leaving running. You can register Backburner to start as a service easily under 2K or XP, but it works by launching a local instance of 3DS, so a user needs to be logged in on the machine that BB's running on for it to work. You DON'T need a separate license for 3DS for the machine doing the backburner rendering, but if you upgrade your PC with a service pack for 3DS then REMEMBER to do the same for the Backburner box.

[Stoo]

Presumably with a home network you can create a nice little render farm with the minimum of fuss

[nichomach]

Certainly could; there's two services that run with BB, the Manager and the actual render service. One machine becomes the manager (which is also a renderer) and its rendering service plus any others that you install automagically registers itself with the manager. You submit your job to the manager and it farms out the work to the renderers that it's aware of.

[Xenctuary]

That seems like a better solution than getting yourself a superior graphics card. Plus it's always nice to have a second machine!