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

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

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??

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

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.

[scaryjim]

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

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

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

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

[kalniel]

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

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.

[scaryjim]

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....

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Thanks for the answers and its a she!!

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.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

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??

[DanceswithUnix]

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

[watercooled]

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