Quadro FX 4500

palm

Hello.
Since I’m these days work with huge scenes along with huge textures I'm getting really frustrated. I’m thinking of getting a Quadro FX 4500 card. Anyone here have any experience with them? How’s it handling huge scenes with lots of rendering passes etc?

And is it worth the money?

Whargoul

Forget the Quadro series for 3D work, just get the best gamer card you can, the 7900 GTX kicks ass!

thomasp

it's too pricey. under the hood it's a slightly enhanced geforce series. if you're using max, a quadro could be very interesting because of maxtreme. but better choose a lower-end model.

for big scenes, your machine will most likely be CPU- and RAM-bound anyway. use display layers, isolate selections to work on, hide what you don't need or display as boxes, turn on textures only for selected objects, etc. graphics cards are way overvalued for this kind of work, imho.

and even if a card significantly speeds up tumbling in your viewport, performance will go down the second you start manipulating things - when the job goes back to the processor.

J.I. Styles

At the office I use a quadro in one computer, and a geforce in the other -- comparing is a literal side by side equation

basically it works like this:
quadro for poly intensive, geforce for video ram or texture intensive. So I'll zbrush on the quadro and load multi-million poly scenes/objects on that, but if I have to texture a character with 6 2048 passes (current example... yeesh I'm despairing at starting 4096x4096 ) I'll do that on the geforce.

Loose untextured polys scream through on the quadro, there's nothing that matches them on that level, but add a texture and it'll chug in comparison.

oh. And maxtreme is good for about 2 improvements but isn't worth it since it's buggy as all hell.

This is just my take on it from using them... when you take price into consideration with this then ummmmm yeah... probably not justified for the price of a quadro = a brand new computer with the latest game card. If you can charge it to the company though

thomasp

J.I. Styles: very happy with maxtreme 7 so far, what kind of bugs are you encountering that don't fit into the "max bugs" category?

J.I. Styles

Major one which has been there for quite a while is video memory becoming partially corrupted when you've got too many textures loaded - textures in viewport become garbaged.

Another is something really odd happening with transforms where the vertex list gets muddled - seems to be related to perspective correction and getting vert list confused, so your mesh explodes in different interesting ways in perspective. There's a few other minor ones, but those are the major ones that can happen. I will say though that these only happen on hugely intensive scenes, so it doesn't happen that often, but when it does it's killer.

palm

Thanks for the answers. Seems like a 7900gtx is the way to go for me. I can get a 7900gtx with 512ram along with a new AMD x2 and a motherboard for half the price of a quadro4500.;)