Avoid SLI, doing game art; this will provide you with absolutely NO benifit, and cause compatability issues with various software. Its always better to just buy one decent card than two crappy cards, on purpose.
SLI isn't a good move, for value or otherwise.
Powebored: You're going to want to go Nvidia, even if it means getting a slightly slower card at a bit worst cost/performance value, you'll be happy with it. You're building a very fast system, so you dont need to get a top end 3d card. You should focus on getting something that has the best features and reliability, as these are important factors in game dev. If you just want a card to run the latest game at the max FPS for the $, go ATI, otherwise go nvidia! Its just not worth the hassle of dealing with ATI drivers.
I have a ~4 year old q6600 quad core, 8gigs of ram and 8800GT, and I can play current games at smooth framerates even at 1920x1200, just to put things into perspective. Buying a 20% faster ATI card at the same price isn't worth it if it means having to deal with ATI drivers and various other ATI-AIDS problems.
ATI owns the $75-125 market, for sure. But once you get into the $150-200 market, you're going to be buying a fast card no matter if its Nvidia or ATI. ATI tends to be a better option for people with serious budgets, who just want to play X new game.
Well I found out that as a student I can get a free copy of windows 7 so that'll save me around $150. The ATI card really seems like the best choice for a budget but I do prefer Nvidia cards, So which do you think I'd be better off with? Galaxy GeForce GTX 560Ti 1024MB - $279 EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 1GB - $299
SLI is also a single monitor solution, personally I use 2 monitors, max and photoshop/art rage and when aniamting the second monitor is where I dock the graph editors and menus.
Thanks Lenny,
I've been using that article among others from Tom's hardware,
Now that you mention it, the 560 only seems to provide a minor improvement over the 6850 for an extra $90, The 460 seems less remarkable than 6850 but at $20 cheaper its worth considering...
I'm still not convinced that the ATI drivers are as awful as everyone says they are, every time i've had a driver problem, i just roll back and everything is fine.
Oooh UV and Animation graph editors on a separate screen sounds amazing!
The Asus EVO has a few extra ports that I probably won't need and bluetooth but apart from that i cant really tell the difference between them, any advice?
SLI does allow you to run duel monitors, however it is disabled when the 2nd monitor is active. The only way to get the benefits of SLI is to pipe it into one monitor which it can switch on SLI as needed, on the fly kind of handy, it used to require a restart when I was using it, major pain in the ass. However even in SLI mode most of the apps we use to build games won't take advantage and its really mostly being used by a handful of games and most of the cards out on the market really don't need to run in SLI mode.
I had SLI running for a while and it wasn't worth it for me, hardly ever used it and when I did it was annoying have the second monitor switched off.
i just roll back and everything is fine.
That's part of the problem, "are these drivers going to work better or worse? Lets roll the dice and see?"
The problems I ran into with ATI drivers is that they put specific fixes in for specific games and then a year or two later they take out those fixes or something that they put into the drivers breaks an old game.
There where issues if you installed certain drivers in a particular order on various cards, you had to edit the registry to get them uninstalled. Why not install over the top without uninstalling? Because that introduced a whole new host of problems and was going against ATI's recommendations... great so the uninstaller is hosed, we have to do brain surgery over the phone or through email and no one knows if the new drivers will work... sweet...
So then you're stuck, do I install the old drivers to get my old favorites going, or do I roll the dice and see if the new drivers work better. When I was doing tech support for Atari we had a crazy list of ATI drivers that went best with what games and had to manage the driver conflicts.
ATI contact:
"oh you have the .8745 installed... Do you also play these games bla bla bla?
No ok then get 8952, its in the driver archive, CAREFUL don't get the 8952a they will blue screen on restart with this particular card.
What? Oh they are in that area of their site with the cobwebs, no really it will work. Wait hold on, don't install those, do you also use word or outlook?
Yes... how do you feel about install specific drivers to play specific games and never launching word again?
No... ok then lets take a wild stab in the dark and try the latest drivers then?
Oh you did. What happened? oh... wow we don't want to go through that again... Ok do you have some chicken wire, a paper towel tube and some crazy glue, we're going to attempt a quadruple driver bypass..."
Nvidia contact: Get the latest drivers. It's working? Great have fun!
Yeah, the peace of mind that comes with Nvidia is worth a little extra for the same performance, or getting a few % slower card for the same money. Really you get what you pay for, always remember that if your ATI card drives you nuts for 6 months and you have to replace it with an Nvidia card, you'll have spent double the money, so spending a little more on Nvidia makes sense.
Also, Nvidia cards have some features like CUDA that ati does not, which may have some cool uses in xnormal or other apps.
What i found helpful when it came to video card performance is to look at the current card naming conventions.
For example you have the Nvidia 400 line which is the 450, 460, 470 and the 480 and then you have the current top of the line Nvidia 500 cards 550, 560, 570 and 580.
With naming conventions like this i presume the 4 cards within the 400 line use the same chipset, as with anything i would steer away from bottom of the line(450) and presume the product at the top with a premium price is mostly about top of the line bragging rights and not performance gain(480/580).
This cut my choices down pretty quickly to either a 460/470 or a 560/570. I didn't see many 470's around, a 480 is still more expensive than a 560 and i didnt feel paying $100 more for a 570 over a 560 justified the performance gain.
So to cut a long story short the choice boiled down to either the 460 or the 560 and about a $100 price difference. And even though Tom's says otherwise, i would have picked up a 560 if there was room in my budget for one
lol, Thanks Mark,
You don't have to tell me more than twice to buy Nvidia,
My last computer ran a Nvidia card and I never even noticed it.
My current computer is running ATI and while its not quite as bad as you described i have had diver issues (which I just had to roll back, but did take some time to solve) among other issues which required fiddling around with options in the extremely messy software they provided.
Is it better save the cash and go for a 460 or cop the extra 70 - 90 dollars on a 560?
Is there a reason why the galaxy card is $20 cheaper other than the Direct CU cooling, is the extra cooling even worth it?
On a side note, I'm going to give props to you guys being a general compendium of useful knowledge. I recently lost my rig so I have to build from scratch once again, one question I have though, should I just splurge and get a Quadro card? I hear they don't even remotely play games well, but I think that would be more motivating than anything. My only concern is how it works when using the Unity, Source, or UDK?
Would I just benefit from building a separate rig just for testing?
The only thing FireGL/Quadro cards do well is display massive wireframes. There's no reason anyone in game design needs one, and it would be counterproductive in many situations. The general consensus is that if a card is stable and plays games decently, it's fine for 3D. Honestly, the only thing a video card does for you is viewport display (with the exception of Mudbox). An 8800gt does everything you need, and only gets better from there. Shoot for something like a Nvidia 460 and you'll be fine.
I'm certainly no expert in AE, but as far as I know the only benefit of a Quadro in AE is the OpenGL preview. I'd think you'd be better off spending the ~$800 difference on more RAM or a better CPU for your final CPU based render. Both those things will carry over performance increases across the board.
Unless you're in special circumstances, I'd think the benefit would be situational at best, and probably not worth the extra dollars unless your RAM/CPU/HD is already maxed out. Even then it's probably not going to perform as well as a standard card with UDK/Unity/etc, so you'd have to weigh the pros and cons of that.
May I ask why Quadro GPUs cost thousands of dollars and are praised as if they can turn a workstation into Optimus Prime, if their performance compared to something like a GTX 580 appears mediocre at best?
I've never been able to find a good answer to this question...
when i asked Mop which cards they use in Splash Damage's machines (Quadro or off the shelf stuff), he answered:
"Off the shelf, gamers don't use quadro, so why use something they don't have access to?"
May I ask why Quadro GPUs cost thousands of dollars and are praised as if they can turn a workstation into Optimus Prime, if their performance compared to something like a GTX 580 appears mediocre at best?
I've never been able to find a good answer to this question...
Drivers and support.
If you buy a new Quadro, and it were to bog down in warranty, you'll get a new one asap. Try doing that with a commercial gaming-grade card...
The drivers for these cards are throughly tested because the last thing someone that constantly pushes millions of verts needs, is a buggy driver.
The drivers also unlock some more hardware features like extra vertex pipes and more viewport clipping thingies (forgot what that was called). The latter makes sure that if a non GL context window is floating over a GL window, only the visible GL portion is drawn (or something down those lines). Which results in a pretty good increase in viewportspeed.
And oh yeah, these things are built like a tank!
This is all fine and dandy for a pro VFX environment where you need to push your GL viewports to the extreme all the time, not so much for game-devs.
Either way, I bought a second hand Quadro FX3700 a while back for 200 euros or something, because I wanted to find out what the fuzz was about first hand.
It's been rock solid for the past 2 years and although it's a loud thing when playing games (dead quit otherwise), I'm pretty happy with it. But it's not to say it made my dual quad machine extra fast.
So stick with a gamer-grade card. I'll be replacing my quadro with a 460GTX soon and keep it as a backup I guess.
Yip, general high profile VFX, medical and research work is where the Quadros shine.
Hardware-wise, there is nothing that justifies the price of a Quadro. They aren't superior to gaming cards, at all.
What you are paying for, is the around the clock support and research/dev costs that went into building the drivers.
That, plus some major cashing in from nvdia's side because they basically pwn the professional GPU market.
Sorry I don't mean to highjack your thread but I really didn't want to create a new one...
I was wondering if anyone had any old video cards they would like to sell? Something like a hd 5570 or lower? (only have a 350W PSU and 2 harddrives, might have to remove one).
Sorry again Powerboard! Hope your PC runs good man
No worries XenoKratios,
Try Ebay, I have a friend who refuses to buy computer parts anywhere else :P
I would recommend upgrading your PSU though, you really don't want to put too much demand on it if you can afford not to because it could fry your other parts.
Thanks for that HUGE post Ryswick, I don't really need it right now but I have a friend who is looking to buy a new computer soon so it'll definitely com in handy.
Would you mind posting a link to where that came from in case the image gets outdated?
A note to ANYONE building a computer. check out this thread before/while/after you build
I put everything together perfectly but my computer didn't start.
I was stressed out beyond belief for about an hour until I found this thread, It turns out my one of my RAM cards wasn't quite pushed all the way in :poly141:
The thread saved me a lot of grief so I recommend a quick run through to anyone, no matter how experienced.
That's all for now,
I might be back later with pictures :P
Thanks again everyone, Powerbored
Sorry I don't mean to highjack your thread but I really didn't want to create a new one...
I was wondering if anyone had any old video cards they would like to sell? Something like a hd 5570 or lower? (only have a 350W PSU and 2 harddrives, might have to remove one).
Sorry again Powerboard! Hope your PC runs good man
I've got a nvidia 7600GS 256mb, fan-less silent cooling(just a big heat sink) used to be on my HTPC but I put something faster in, I think its pretty low power consumption and not so old that it would be shit slow. Send me a PM if interested.
But yeah, I would also recommend upgrading your PSU, its a pretty easy job, and a new psu should only cost about $60.
Replies
SLI isn't a good move, for value or otherwise.
Powebored: You're going to want to go Nvidia, even if it means getting a slightly slower card at a bit worst cost/performance value, you'll be happy with it. You're building a very fast system, so you dont need to get a top end 3d card. You should focus on getting something that has the best features and reliability, as these are important factors in game dev. If you just want a card to run the latest game at the max FPS for the $, go ATI, otherwise go nvidia! Its just not worth the hassle of dealing with ATI drivers.
I have a ~4 year old q6600 quad core, 8gigs of ram and 8800GT, and I can play current games at smooth framerates even at 1920x1200, just to put things into perspective. Buying a 20% faster ATI card at the same price isn't worth it if it means having to deal with ATI drivers and various other ATI-AIDS problems.
ATI owns the $75-125 market, for sure. But once you get into the $150-200 market, you're going to be buying a fast card no matter if its Nvidia or ATI. ATI tends to be a better option for people with serious budgets, who just want to play X new game.
Galaxy GeForce GTX 560Ti 1024MB - $279
EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 1GB - $299
ASUS Radeon HD6850 DirectCU - $205
XFX Radeon HD6850 1GB - $205
Earthquake/Mark - feeling pretty good about going with a single Nvidia card at this point, particularly the double monitor and driver issues.
I've been using that article among others from Tom's hardware,
Now that you mention it, the 560 only seems to provide a minor improvement over the 6850 for an extra $90, The 460 seems less remarkable than 6850 but at $20 cheaper its worth considering...
I'm still not convinced that the ATI drivers are as awful as everyone says they are, every time i've had a driver problem, i just roll back and everything is fine.
Oooh UV and Animation graph editors on a separate screen sounds amazing!
Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD4-B3 Motherboard - $235
ASUS P8P67 PRO Motherboard B3 - $205
ASUS P8P67 EVO Motherboard B3 - $269
The Asus EVO has a few extra ports that I probably won't need and bluetooth but apart from that i cant really tell the difference between them, any advice?
I had SLI running for a while and it wasn't worth it for me, hardly ever used it and when I did it was annoying have the second monitor switched off.
That's part of the problem, "are these drivers going to work better or worse? Lets roll the dice and see?"
The problems I ran into with ATI drivers is that they put specific fixes in for specific games and then a year or two later they take out those fixes or something that they put into the drivers breaks an old game.
There where issues if you installed certain drivers in a particular order on various cards, you had to edit the registry to get them uninstalled. Why not install over the top without uninstalling? Because that introduced a whole new host of problems and was going against ATI's recommendations... great so the uninstaller is hosed, we have to do brain surgery over the phone or through email and no one knows if the new drivers will work... sweet...
So then you're stuck, do I install the old drivers to get my old favorites going, or do I roll the dice and see if the new drivers work better. When I was doing tech support for Atari we had a crazy list of ATI drivers that went best with what games and had to manage the driver conflicts.
ATI contact:
"oh you have the .8745 installed... Do you also play these games bla bla bla?
No ok then get 8952, its in the driver archive, CAREFUL don't get the 8952a they will blue screen on restart with this particular card.
What? Oh they are in that area of their site with the cobwebs, no really it will work. Wait hold on, don't install those, do you also use word or outlook?
Yes... how do you feel about install specific drivers to play specific games and never launching word again?
No... ok then lets take a wild stab in the dark and try the latest drivers then?
Oh you did. What happened? oh... wow we don't want to go through that again... Ok do you have some chicken wire, a paper towel tube and some crazy glue, we're going to attempt a quadruple driver bypass..."
Nvidia contact: Get the latest drivers. It's working? Great have fun!
Also, Nvidia cards have some features like CUDA that ati does not, which may have some cool uses in xnormal or other apps.
For example you have the Nvidia 400 line which is the 450, 460, 470 and the 480 and then you have the current top of the line Nvidia 500 cards 550, 560, 570 and 580.
With naming conventions like this i presume the 4 cards within the 400 line use the same chipset, as with anything i would steer away from bottom of the line(450) and presume the product at the top with a premium price is mostly about top of the line bragging rights and not performance gain(480/580).
This cut my choices down pretty quickly to either a 460/470 or a 560/570. I didn't see many 470's around, a 480 is still more expensive than a 560 and i didnt feel paying $100 more for a 570 over a 560 justified the performance gain.
So to cut a long story short the choice boiled down to either the 460 or the 560 and about a $100 price difference. And even though Tom's says otherwise, i would have picked up a 560 if there was room in my budget for one
You don't have to tell me more than twice to buy Nvidia,
My last computer ran a Nvidia card and I never even noticed it.
My current computer is running ATI and while its not quite as bad as you described i have had diver issues (which I just had to roll back, but did take some time to solve) among other issues which required fiddling around with options in the extremely messy software they provided.
So basically it comes down to:
ASUS GeForce GTX 460 Direct CU 1GB - $209
or
Galaxy GeForce GTX 560Ti 1024MB - $279 /
ASUS GTX 560 Ti DirectCU II Overclocked 1GB - $299
Is it better save the cash and go for a 460 or cop the extra 70 - 90 dollars on a 560?
Is there a reason why the galaxy card is $20 cheaper other than the Direct CU cooling, is the extra cooling even worth it?
I'll let you know how it all goes when it gets here.
Thanks to everyone who helped on this thread,
Powerbored
Would I just benefit from building a separate rig just for testing?
Unless you're in special circumstances, I'd think the benefit would be situational at best, and probably not worth the extra dollars unless your RAM/CPU/HD is already maxed out. Even then it's probably not going to perform as well as a standard card with UDK/Unity/etc, so you'd have to weigh the pros and cons of that.
I've never been able to find a good answer to this question...
"Off the shelf, gamers don't use quadro, so why use something they don't have access to?"
Drivers and support.
If you buy a new Quadro, and it were to bog down in warranty, you'll get a new one asap. Try doing that with a commercial gaming-grade card...
The drivers for these cards are throughly tested because the last thing someone that constantly pushes millions of verts needs, is a buggy driver.
The drivers also unlock some more hardware features like extra vertex pipes and more viewport clipping thingies (forgot what that was called). The latter makes sure that if a non GL context window is floating over a GL window, only the visible GL portion is drawn (or something down those lines). Which results in a pretty good increase in viewportspeed.
And oh yeah, these things are built like a tank!
This is all fine and dandy for a pro VFX environment where you need to push your GL viewports to the extreme all the time, not so much for game-devs.
Either way, I bought a second hand Quadro FX3700 a while back for 200 euros or something, because I wanted to find out what the fuzz was about first hand.
It's been rock solid for the past 2 years and although it's a loud thing when playing games (dead quit otherwise), I'm pretty happy with it. But it's not to say it made my dual quad machine extra fast.
So stick with a gamer-grade card. I'll be replacing my quadro with a 460GTX soon and keep it as a backup I guess.
I still don't see how that justifies the price though...
Hardware-wise, there is nothing that justifies the price of a Quadro. They aren't superior to gaming cards, at all.
What you are paying for, is the around the clock support and research/dev costs that went into building the drivers.
That, plus some major cashing in from nvdia's side because they basically pwn the professional GPU market.
But I'm building my computer today, its awesome and scary
Still waiting on my parts to arrive this end... although im pretty happy they at least ship it to the middle of nowhere
Sorry I don't mean to highjack your thread but I really didn't want to create a new one...
I was wondering if anyone had any old video cards they would like to sell? Something like a hd 5570 or lower? (only have a 350W PSU and 2 harddrives, might have to remove one).
Sorry again Powerboard! Hope your PC runs good man
Try Ebay, I have a friend who refuses to buy computer parts anywhere else :P
I would recommend upgrading your PSU though, you really don't want to put too much demand on it if you can afford not to because it could fry your other parts.
Thanks for that HUGE post Ryswick, I don't really need it right now but I have a friend who is looking to buy a new computer soon so it'll definitely com in handy.
Would you mind posting a link to where that came from in case the image gets outdated?
A note to ANYONE building a computer.
check out this thread before/while/after you build
I put everything together perfectly but my computer didn't start.
I was stressed out beyond belief for about an hour until I found this thread, It turns out my one of my RAM cards wasn't quite pushed all the way in :poly141:
The thread saved me a lot of grief so I recommend a quick run through to anyone, no matter how experienced.
That's all for now,
I might be back later with pictures :P
Thanks again everyone,
Powerbored
I've got a nvidia 7600GS 256mb, fan-less silent cooling(just a big heat sink) used to be on my HTPC but I put something faster in, I think its pretty low power consumption and not so old that it would be shit slow. Send me a PM if interested.
But yeah, I would also recommend upgrading your PSU, its a pretty easy job, and a new psu should only cost about $60.