hello everyone
i,m looking for a graphic card can handle 3ds max and autocad as well as a bit of gaming.
please fire away your recommendations
wanna spend around £100
thanks
hello everyone
i,m looking for a graphic card can handle 3ds max and autocad as well as a bit of gaming.
please fire away your recommendations
wanna spend around £100
thanks
As a CAD manager I'd recomend an nVidia Quadro FX card, best you can afford. It's the way the cards handle data fom these apps, which is different from gaming cards. Don't make bad gaming cards, but then some gaming cards dont aren't bad at handling CAD. Decide on your primary purpose & go down that route.
Well as the Nvidia, Ati war/domination of the market has basically killed off the few remaining good card makes you're stuck with the Quadro or Fire GL, neather of which are half as good as the 3dLabs/Wildcats were.
You can try ebay, you might get lucky. If not I'd sugest a low end Geforce like a 7600 as they have better OpenGL than the Radeon drivers do currently. (from what I've read don't look at an 8xxx series as they are pritty bad for OpenGL)
For £100 I'd advoid both the Quadro and fireGL as there's nothing decent for £100 and you'd be better off with a normal Geforce/radeon
One final note one all of these cards, they do absolutely nothing for rendering, just can run the view windows in OpenGL mode to take strain off the cpu.
Without wanting to chuck a spanner in the works, it seems that Autodesk have made the latest versions of AutoCAD and 3DStudio Max less openGL dependent. This could be due to the transition to Vista, but reading some of the discussion boards on the autodesk website, alot of users are starting to see better performance with gaming cards when using the 2008 version of AutoCAD in vista. Max is starting to run alot better on ATI cards now due to them being better performers in directX.
But, in light of the above I would still recommend a quadro. If you hunt around on ebay, you could get an FX 1500, which is the geforce 7600 equivalent card.
I doubt the FX1500 is worth it, like I said they are not very good cards.
If you can find someware that still sells a "3Dlabs Wildcat Realizm 500" that was the bottom of there PCI-e range of cards and it performs around/slightly better than the FX4400
If you can find a 3Dlabs Wildcat Realizm 800 and can afford it, then go for it as it still out performs every other card.
thanks a lot for all this
i checked eb*y and there are no where to be found.
any ideas where i can get such a card.
thanks
Found only 1 Realizm 500 for sale
A certain auction site it's a swiss shop selling it 400euro+20euro shipping to UK
apart from that a few of the AGP Realizm's and that's it.
Like I said IF you can find them, they were not the eaiest of things to get hold of when 3dlabs/wildcat studios where still going.
Your probably best off with a 7600 or 7300GT or x1650Pro, they are all well under £100, spend the extra on CPU that's generally more important for rendering
Infact the graphics card is not used at all by max when you render, its only the view windows
Last edited by Pob255; 22-06-2007 at 02:43 PM.
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