My First Gaming/Render PC Build

[jim]

Personally, no. I would get just an SSD if that was sufficient space, an SSD and a HDD and use them according to how fast I need certain items to be accessed, or just an HDD and save my cash for when I can afford an SSD I want.

My impression from reviews etc is that the hybrids don't really give you the best of both worlds as you might hope.

[walnutman21]

Alright, you have convinced me to dump the Hybrid and either wait on the SSD or just go for it.

After further reading, it seems that in both After Effects and Cinema 4D, the processor does all of the pulling while the graphics card is really just for the viewport (preview window) unless you are rendering in 3D Ray Tracing in AE CS6 (or using a program like 3DS Max or Maya that utilizes the CUDA cores, neither of which I plan on using extensively).
So I will probably grab the GTX 660ti for the gaming capabilities and it will be sufficient for the viewport. Just no 3D Ray Tracing cause my processor will be far more capable.
Also its relevant to mention that I just read the Mac Pros will be getting an upgrade very soon, might be worthwhile to wait. Its going to be minimum $2500 most likely, maybe with the new Xeon E5 V2 standard? That would be nice, but who needs disc drives and Radeon graphics cards?

[kompukare]

I guess Nvidia feel confident enough with CUDA that segmenting their cards into gaming and compute models will not backfire on them. The GK110 (big Kepler) is meant to come to Geforce card to.

But the risk is of course that AMD do have great double precision on their GCN cards (although Tahiti does outperform Pitcairn by a lot in DP and it's possible that the 8xxx series will take the lesson of Pitcairn (performance / watt of is better than Kepler) and concentrate there since HD7970 was a bit power hungry mainly because of it's superior DP performance).

Going forward, Adobe seem very keen to switch from CUDA to OpenCL but ATM I believe the Mac version has done so with the Windows version somewhat behind.

But does good viewport support not require Quadra / FireGL cards? Think the normal card's drivers are no longer hackable.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Adobe has already shown After Effects on the PC using OpenCL running on the Trinity IGP. Moreover for viewpoint speeds professional cards seem to be much faster than the gaming ones,even if they have worse specifications.

Radeon graphics cards?

The HD7900 series have much greater DP performance than even a GTX680 and are very good at running OpenCL. You do realise that CS6 for OS X ditched CUDA for OpenCL??

The HD7970 and HD7950 are extremely fast in GPU accelerated raytracing benchmarks too,which seem to use OpenCL.

I guess Nvidia feel confident enough with CUDA that segmenting their cards into gaming and compute models will not backfire on them. The GK110 (big Kepler) is meant to come to Geforce card to.

Its meant to be £500 to £600 though!!

[walnutman21]

The HD7900 series have much greater DP performance than even a GTX680 and are very good at running OpenCL. You do realise that CS6 for OS X ditched CUDA for OpenCL??

No I did not realize, but that's good to know.
I guess I never looked into the OSX future because everything I have learned up to this point tells me to go NVIDIA, but OSX ditching CUDA makes me think otherwise even if I am building a PC (I am mainly a Mac user).

So a HD7970 for double precision but less gaming capability/more power draw, etc. would be the recommended balance?

It also looks like the HD6990 is an OpenCL beast and benchmarks way better at gaming, but overshadowed in DirectCompute:
http://media.bestofmicro.com/I/I/331...ndra-gpgpu.png

Edit: Didn't realize the HD6990 was double the price... might as well go with FireGL/Quadro