New graphic card?

[fuad4s]

Hello,

I have Nvidia 560 gtx card at the moment (which appear to do nothing more than my ancient 9800 gt could do) and I'm thinking of alternatives, my usage is:

1- Character animation in SI, Maya, Max.
2- Mudbox, 3d coat.
3- After Effects, Nuke.
4- Gaming is -very rare- but would be a plus.

For me, Quadro & Firegl are not an option, the available choices in my place are:
A- Nvidia 660 gtx, 670 gtx, 760 gtx, 770 gtx.
But regarding Nvidia, does cuda cores really work especially in viewport?

B- ATI 270, 280x, 6970.
What do you think about ATI drivers?

Thanks!

[Bullit]

Cuda only works for rendering if the render engine specifically uses them. It is useless for viewport for now.

[fuad4s]

Cuda only works for rendering if the render engine specifically uses them. It is useless for viewport for now.

Thanks Bullit for clearing that up, do you have any recommendation regarding the display card?

[SpookyMunky]

For me, Quadro & Firegl are not an option, the available choices in my place are:
A- Nvidia 660 gtx, 670 gtx, 760 gtx, 770 gtx.

call me crazy but since a gtx 770 is basically an overclocked gtx 680 with faster ram (and available in 4gb models which I am loving) doesn't that kinda rule out all the other cards ?

edit: for cuda you are hard pushed to see much in xsi without swapping out the engine really.. I'm far from an expert on the subject. Best Iv been able to get mental ray in xsi to do is render out ambient occlusion passes from my card, though it seemed to only want to do that after the cpu portion had been finished ? , lol.. kinda negated the point of offloading work to the gpu when cpu will take a break while its doing its thing hehe . That being said, when buying a gfx card for a nice little gfx workstation just remember amd/ati cards only support opencl for decent multicore workflow, nvidia cards support cuda + opencl...... not that hard a decision in my mind

edit2: ...That, and most pro apps are designed to work purely with quadros in mind (is an easy cop out for them, don't have a quadro ?, no support! hehe)... chances are nvidia gaming card is more compatible than a completely different gpu no ?

edit3: heh, sorry just to be clear, no-one from softimage support has ever denied me support for admitting to not have quadro hehe, they do ask and sigh a bit tho ;)

[angus_davidson]

As posted in the other thread. Quadro cards dont mean a thing unless the program has specific driver to make use of the extra awesomeness. I have never noticed any difference between the gaming cards and a quadro under softimage.

The 5xx series of Nvidia cards are know to have have issues with 3d applications. Best stick witha 4xx or 6xx series.

As mentioned above Cuda cores are only used for Rendering currently if you have one that makes use of it ex octane, redshift etc.

[SpookyMunky]

Cuda does get used in stock xsi if you set mray to render ao on gfx card.. for me it pauses the render though so I havent really been able to get much benefit from it ?. for a nice ao map its a coin toss between cpu and gpu the way xsi is doing it. still.. its a step in the right direction!

next step being vray... sigh, damn the 3dsmax users...... or lol.. opensubd+dx11... damn the maya users....

edit: hmm, possibly its a thing with command line / raysat / whatever to get both cpu and gpu rendering at same time ?.. not done command line renders since 32bit xp, lol

[fuad4s]

Thanks SpookyMunky, Angus Davidson for your great input.

Kind Regards

[MauricioPC]

Just in a side note ... but isn't character animation light on viewport? I haven't done much of CA since it's not my playground. Just curious tho.

When I see videos from animation, bhs, etc, the viewport looks very light in comparison to viewports for simulation, heavy modeling, etc.


As for the cards, I'm in a similar position right now. I'm between the GTX 660Ti and the GTX 770. One is more cheaper, but it'll give me a better result than my GTX 550Ti. But I'm thinking of some vacation next year in the USA, so I might wait and go all crazy in Amazon when I'm there. I'll probably save 50% on the price.

Another thing I'll do (if I get to have my vacations in US) is to buy a nice SSD to operates on my system drive. SSD here just costs 3x time.

[SpookyMunky]

any amount of time you can leave getting gfx card will = better performance / price so if its not urgent might aswell wait .. nvidia brought out 780ti a couple weeks after me getting my nice fancy 770.. dropping the 780 price to around what I paid.. sigh . I'm not bitter.... hehe, animation side of things gfx shouldn't make much of a change since think all deformations are cpu based ?.. it will help if you are trying to previs heavy scenes with craploads of textures n characters etc tho ..

One thing I have noticed in a huge way with new gfx card is all of my application crashes have disappeared, lol.. is one thing thats kinda bugged me since building a semi decent pc last year.. 32gig ram, why still crashy hehe.. seems I tend to use between 2 and 3 gig of vram just working away.. am a bit sloppy in that respect I guess...my poor old gtx 470 only had ~1.2 gig vram though, the occasional crashes make a bit more sense to me now

Edit: ssd definately a nice little upgrade too, ugh.. never thought Id say that .. they are so overpriced and silly , cant imagine life without them now tho... price has dropped nicely aswell, picked up a cheeky little 120gig for under uk£60 a week ago to use as a scratch for photoshop n ae etc my windows ssd I am very stingy with, want it to last forever

[fuad4s]

@Gonebadfx: actually character animation (especially when you have more than one character) is very demanding regarding viewport performance, and sadly it is the most neglected areas in 3d software development through out the years (despite what they say).
and yes, I'm leaning to 770 too.

@SpookyMunky: thanks for the great input, I'll put the upgrade on hold as much as possible and see what happens.

Kind Regards