questions about vid cards
So long story short my "new" laptop sucks and isn't anywhere near good enough for my ambitions of high poly modeling and lots of Zbrush work. Despite it's hardware being about twice or 2.5 times better than my current laptop it still struggles with the same 100k polies in maya, etc.
So I'm looking into a desktop dedicated to 3d modeling, photoshop and zbrush work.
In my search I have run across quadro fx cards. What are these? I see from a little google searching they're for "workstations." I have no clue what this means.
Also, should a build of this sort, my dedicated station, have any different components as compared to a gaming tower? I guess this is related to the quadro question.
Thank you PC.
So I'm looking into a desktop dedicated to 3d modeling, photoshop and zbrush work.
In my search I have run across quadro fx cards. What are these? I see from a little google searching they're for "workstations." I have no clue what this means.
Also, should a build of this sort, my dedicated station, have any different components as compared to a gaming tower? I guess this is related to the quadro question.
Thank you PC.
Replies
Those cards are mainly for people in industrial design/architectural work that need to display incredibly dense wireframes without slowdown. They'll have them at an auto manufacturer to view the entire wireframe of a car with all its parts modeled, or for architects working on the systems of a ten story building. That'd be nice for you in wireframe mode, but they don't play games well and they aren't really any faster for game art. Working in UDK or another game engine will be slower than on a regular card. Their drivers aren't compatible with a lot of regular stuff. One trick ponies. They're only good at displaying millions of single pixel lines without slow down. They're also really, really expensive. Spend your money elsewhere.
Not really. There are things you can do to help it along, like more RAM and a fast (SSD) hard drive. Your video card almost doesn't matter (as long as you're not using Mudbox, then it does). It's just for displaying stuff on your screen, not for doing any complicated processing. The CPU does that. Other than that, reliable parts over new, incredibly fast stuff. There are people here making pro art on pretty outdated machines. Almost any 'modern' computer will let you make art just fine.
Gamers build computers to play games very fast, this generally means buying the cheapest possible equipment with the best performance without regard to compatibility or stability, ie: AMD and ATI. Also, gamers tend to spend extra money on stupid crap to overclock their computer, like fancy cooling, really expensive cases with tons of fans and leds, and super expensive power supplies to run gimmicky stuff like SLI.
For a workstation, you want to buy quality, stable components. Instead of buying that motherboard that is rated as the best overclocking and can support 3x SLI and a bunch of other crap you dont need, get the most stable motherboard you can find that only has support for the stuff you actually need. For everything else, just buy what you need, a 550w power supply will power most modern workstation, resist the temptation to spend twice as much for a 1000w so you can "maybe do SLI later" or whatever.
The cost that you'll save by buying a reasonable power supply, case, ram(avoid the super expensive "gamer" stuff, its generally just marginally better at 2x the cost), you can put into a better CPU, more ram, a better video card, a fast SSD drive, etc. These things are all very important to building a good workstation. My rule of thumb is your CPU should always be the most expensive component of your build, and getting a nice fast quad core CPU is very important when you start baking AO and stuff like that that can really take time.
[Edit] Oh and quadros, skip them. A decent nvidia gamer card will outperform it when it comes to running realtime shaders, or something like UDK.
In my case we had some laptops with nice Quadro's in it, and their performance (for anything else than 3d modelling) was far below par, and their drivers were very far behind with the "normal consumer" drivers causing all sorts of troubles. Playing a simple OpenGL game would bring the card to its knees, or even worse, crash the machine.
Also, Because there's not that many people using those cards (especially compared to the "standard gaming cards) specific bugs don't show up that often, and in our case there wasn't much hurry to fix our troubles as well.
Drivers are often far behind the consumer drivers as well (for example, Quadro drivers
for
Quadro 3dsmax: 2009.09.22 (191.00)
Consumer drivers: 2011.01.18 (266.58)
In case you would end up having trouble, you might have to wait a long time before your problem gets fixed.
I'd say you'd be better off buying a higher-end consumer card (they're quite fast nowadays) and spend your money on extra ram / some better CPU.
Just my 2 cents.