graphics card and the role they play?

[thorsnuts]

Hello..

I was thinking about updating my graphics card from a GeForce gtx 280 to something current. The thing is... I don't know if ill benefit from an update at all, and I need some advice if I should spend the money.

I don't use GPU rendering at all... and I don't really plan on it in the near future. I do however use 2 monitors and all aspects of the 3d world such as modeling, animation, ICE, Post work, and I just got myself a new Cintiq for drawing and sculpting.

I was thinking about the new Titan Black, but is it worth it?

thanks for the time,
-

[McNistor]

I was thinking about the new Titan Black, but is it worth it?

No, it's one of the most overpriced pieces of tech out there. Unless you don't care about money which I'm guessing it's not the case, but even then it's not like this is the fastest GPU, it just has a big amount of VRAM (6Gb) and since you don't do rendering with the video card I really can't recommend it.

Whether it's worth upgrading from GTX280 or not, it depends on how much and how far you're going to go into sculpting/texturing.
For pure Softimage work (viewport) 280 is more than enough.
I personally started sculpting&texturing with the intention to specialize, leaving rigging/animation on a 2nd (if not 3rd) plane and I went for Sapphire R9 290.
4Gb Vram, great OpenGL performance coupled with a competitive price compared to nVidia's performance equivalent makes it a best buy as far as I'm concerned.

[thorsnuts]

thank you for your opinion...

Well I feel that sculpting and texturing will bring my work to the next level... so I will be diving in pretty deep. Does Zbrush or Mudbox rely on the GPU more than the CPU? Does having more vRAM help with the lag softimage has when dealing with a heavy scene? Or is that just the software acting up?

Does it also help with something like After Effects in anyway? or is that just RAM and CPU power.

Im just trying to figure out what a GPU like the Titan Black or the one you mentioned is good for besides having battlefield 4 at full res. you know?

thanks again,

[McNistor]

thank you for your opinion...

Well I feel that sculpting and texturing will bring my work to the next level... so I will be diving in pretty deep. Does Zbrush or Mudbox rely on the GPU more than the CPU? Does having more vRAM help with the lag softimage has when dealing with a heavy scene? Or is that just the software acting up?

Does it also help with something like After Effects in anyway? or is that just RAM and CPU power.

Im just trying to figure out what a GPU like the Titan Black or the one you mentioned is good for besides having battlefield 4 at full res. you know?

thanks again,

Zbrush uses CPU only - might change in a future version. Mudbox is GPU/vRAM amount dependent.
More vRAM doesn't help with Softimage viewport, at least not beyond a certain amount (which is exceeded even by old GPUs, gtx280 included) because it's an old implementation (good, but still old) and it doesn't know how to make use of the full potential of the newest GPUs. More vRAM helps in games (for high-res), Mudbox, Mari and GPU renderers (like Redshift) for loading geom/textures.

Titan is just as good as gtx780/R9-290X, except you'll pay a lot more for some extra vRAM.
If you need CUDA you pretty much have to go nVidia, if you don't, I recommend an AMD card as they're more powerful (GPU wise as well as vRAM amount) for the same amount of $

[myara]

I haven't used Quadros lately, but a few years ago, Quadros used to do a difference when dealing with very dense meshes. A friend claims it still does, but I haven't confirmed.

[thorsnuts]

thanks guys... still researching myself, but I do appreciate time.

long live XSI!!

[Rez007]

I just wanted to drop a friendly notice. From what you posted it seems like you use a lot of the CPU versus the GPU at the moment. If you can wait, DDR4 Ram is coming out later this year, and the new Intel Haswell-E (K Series) chipsets are coming too, which will be the first to support DDR4 Ram. I have no idea how long it will take to reach consumer market (speculations are coming out as Q3/Q4 of this year) and no idea how much it will be - probably expensive since it is the newest tech. I just wanted to give you a heads-up in case that might suit your needs better than dropping the cash on a video card right now.