Best graphics card for budget Maya/3DS Max and Blender build

Budget is not too high -at most £200 to £250 for the card for now(its just a starter until there is a budget) and it will be paired with a Xeon E3 1230 V3(Core i7 4770 basically).

I had a look through a few reviews of the professional cards,and it appears AMD has a lead for Maya and 3DS Max on the budget end,but loses to Nvidia for Blender:

http://www.cgchannel.com/2013/11/gro...nal-gpus-2013/
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...card,3868.html
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/best-w...-32728-19.html

I assume that the AMD W4100 should be better than the Quadro K620,unless they are some other suggestions.

What about the W5100 which is around £270?

OF course the other path is to use a consumer grade card - now would a GTX780 or R9 290 be better??

Would an R9 280 for under £150 be a good budget alternative??

BTW this is for a mate.

Its mostly for design work with some rendering being done,so I assume viewpoint acceleration is more important. Will need to ask what software is being used first or most.

Nothing game related AFAIK.

I know that VRAM is more important hence why I was looking at some of the cheaper AMD cards like the R9 280 for example.

Right they are using this too:

http://www.daz3d.com/home

So Blender and Daz3D first and then 3DS Max and Maya when more funds are available to buy licenses.

Saw this article about Daz3D:

http://www.digisprawl.com/blog/hardw...-luxrender/#ds

Seems to use OpenGL.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH

... So Blender and Daz3D first and then 3DS Max and Maya when more funds are available to buy licenses. ...

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If that's definitely going to happen, then I'd've thought a professional card would be absolutely the right decision to take advantage of the huge amounts of work AMD and nvidia put into optimising their pro/workstation cards.

In the price range, I think the FirePro W5000 looks like a pretty good bet, tbh - it's a 768 shader cards with 2GB GDDR5 memory on a 256bit bus (no idea if it's a harvested core, a workstation-special silicon, or if the Bonnaire GPU has a 256bit memory interface baked in that it doesn't use in consumer form), and can be picked up from a few places for around £250 (looks like it might have recently had a price chop):

http://www.amazon.co.uk/2DisplayPort.../dp/B0093HV5AK
http://www.yoyotech.co.uk/2gb-gddr5-...0-31004-32-40A
http://www.dabs.com/products/amd-sap...ci-e-9YCZ.html

I heard something about some price cuts today - it seems Blender does use CUDA though.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH

I heard something about some price cuts today - it seems Blender does use CUDA though.

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If he's so time critical then he can probably afford (via passing costs onto his clients) a non-budget card. If he's not time critical then you can do without CUDA acceleration.

And if he's planning to move on from blender in the future then getting a card just for Blender would seem ... short-sighted, as you mention earlier that AMD seem to do better in the pro software.

I guess the alternative would be to throw together a dirt cheap box with a budget NV card (or a second hand one - maybe a GTX480 or similar) in for doing the Blender work that can be CUDA accelerated, if it'll make that much difference. If I was him I'd get someone who has an NV card to try performing whatever CUDA-accelerated tasks he wants to do with and without acceleration. The gains over a decent CPU (particularly an 8-thread Xeon) might not be that noticeable, and have to be weighed against the gains he'll get from AMD in the other software....

Thanks for the answers and its a she!!:p

It seems it will be mostly designing work with some rendering involved. So I assume viewpoint acceleration will be important?

Edit!!

I also asked over on OcUK too:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/sho...9&postcount=11

Thats a GTX570 against a R9 290 in Blender,although again I agree it might be shortsighted to not consider the other software too.

Second Edit!!

I think I will need to clarify what renderers my mate is using and what percentage of their workflow is rendering and what is designing models. Also the split of the software used.

It took a while but they got back to me. Blender and Daz3D will be used first.

So what Nvidia card??

One of the following is what I am thinking about:
1.)GTX760
2.)GTX960
3.)Secondhand GTX580 3GB
4.)GTX770??
5.)Quadro card for some sort??

Any other suggestions??

I thought Blender had third party rendering engines for AMD?

Also ISTR the benchmarks were something like you only needed a GT430 to outpace a top end i7, which makes me wonder at sites using blender as a CPU benchmark :)

Plenty of sites are still using SuperPi. Nuff said...