Professional Rendering Video Cards
I hope this is the right forum section for this.
I'm in the process of building a new PC and I'm having trouble choosing the video card. I know I should go with a rendering video card instead of a gaming video card. Here are some key points so you can help.
Of course the Radeon HD 7970 is the best video card out there at the moment but again, it's for gaming and I'm not sure that it could keep up, though I'm sure it will do alright. Which I could buy 2 Radeon HD 7970's, if that would be the best solution?
For my price range, none of the Geforce Quardo's are any better then the ATI I'm leaning towards.
I was able to find this ATI FirePro V7900 for $700USD, which is better then the Radeon HD 7970, right?
Unless someone else has another recommendations I'm leaning towards the ATI FirePro V7900 because it's better then the Radeon HD 7970 and the Geforce Quardo's, considering my budget.
It would be nice to find a website like this one so I could compare the rendering video cards, if anyone knows of one.
I just don't wanna be going into weeks of render time. So mainly, what is the BEST video card to get for the 3d modeling, animation, and 1080p video editing, thats under 1 grand?
+R4H. Thanks!
I'm in the process of building a new PC and I'm having trouble choosing the video card. I know I should go with a rendering video card instead of a gaming video card. Here are some key points so you can help.
- Specs: Cosmos 2, i7-3930K, Rampage IV Extreme, Samsung F3, Noctua NH-D14, OCZ Vertex 3, G.Skill Ripjaws X 16GB (8 x 2GB) DDR3 1600MHz, W7 Ultimate 64-bit.
- Will be rendering a lot of 1080p quality video. From shorts, to tv show episodes to full movies. So I may end up needing to render 2-3 hours worth of 1080p quality video.
- Will be using Maya, 3DS, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and After Effects type programs. Mainly just for effects and animation effects.
- Main video program I'll be using is Sony Vegas Pro 11, and/or Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.
- Cash limit, $1,000USD.
- Needs to be reliable, good reviews, long lasting, etc.
Of course the Radeon HD 7970 is the best video card out there at the moment but again, it's for gaming and I'm not sure that it could keep up, though I'm sure it will do alright. Which I could buy 2 Radeon HD 7970's, if that would be the best solution?
For my price range, none of the Geforce Quardo's are any better then the ATI I'm leaning towards.
I was able to find this ATI FirePro V7900 for $700USD, which is better then the Radeon HD 7970, right?
Unless someone else has another recommendations I'm leaning towards the ATI FirePro V7900 because it's better then the Radeon HD 7970 and the Geforce Quardo's, considering my budget.
It would be nice to find a website like this one so I could compare the rendering video cards, if anyone knows of one.
I just don't wanna be going into weeks of render time. So mainly, what is the BEST video card to get for the 3d modeling, animation, and 1080p video editing, thats under 1 grand?
+R4H. Thanks!
Replies
They will actually be less performant than regular gaming cards and costs you bucketloads more.
That said, for half of that stuff you mention, your CPU is more important like George says. Maybe you should do some reading up to understand the difference between offline rendering on CPu and realtime rendeirng on GPU?
Even though I will be doing all this 1080p and 3d mondeling / animation?
Yes?
Processing video is processor/RAM intensive, hard drive intensive perhaps, but not in the slightest GPU intensive. You can get by with a modest video card, just make sure it has a lot of vram for previewing effects etc.
Your GPU certaintly won't effect your render/processing time, unless that is somehow GPU accelerated.
From what I understand atleast, I'm not a video editor guy so I could be totally wrong, but I dont think GPU is that important. You certainly don't need a quadro or firegl, cards that are optimized to render anti-aliased wireframes in autocad and whatnot.
[edit] Doing a little more research it looks like the latest version of Premiere supports some GPU accelerated CUDA stuff? In that case an ATI card would be out of the question. http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/tech-specs.html
Even then, if you're considering spending a lot on a GPU, you might be better off going with a dual-cpu workstation for mega speed.
Check this thread too: http://forums.adobe.com/message/4047667 it looks like # of cuda cores on your GPU may mean a lot to premiere.
This too: http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/choosing-a-graphics-card-for-premiere-pro-cs55.html
And since I've heard that any AMD / ATI cards have been known to act weird with Maya, I should go with GeForce, which means, it would be smarter to wait for their newest card to come out, like the 600/700 series, and get that.
So it will be the best card on the market, and hopefully it will have water cooling also. Which GeForce has much MORE support with all of these programs as I've heard?
This sound right?
How I understood it they had better performance for rendering (which is what resgame wanted) improving V-Ray, Mental Ray and iRay, but not much of a benefit for real-time performance?
If the Quardo and the FirePro cards would give me better quality then the gaming cards, since the gaming and render cards are the same price really, I'd want quality more then speed.
So if I'm going to be paying the same price, $700, wouldn't quality be better to have then speed? Which I'd think the Quardo, and the FirePro cards would have the speed also.
Just because rendering cards are usually used for AutoCAD and such, doesn't mean it wouldn't perform as good or better as a gaming card on the programs I will be using?
HD viewport mainly.
Very important difference you need to understand (since people don't feel like looking this up themselves):
Realtime rendering: viewport stuff, 60+fps, realtime superfast. This is what games do, this is what the viewport does. Uses realtime shaders, does things like post-processing, shadows, all at highspeed. Can ONLY be done by graphics cards.
Offline rendering: used to be a CPU only thing. Every frame is calculated completely different to how realtime rendering works, by simply put, raytracing things. On CPU this is slow, takes a long time, but looks the best and most realistic, so is used for movies and so. Renderers like Mental Ray, Vray, Renderman, etc are this kind of thing.
Nowadays, with advances in current technology (the past 5-6 years only really), you can also use your graphics card for this. It does require the rendered to be specifically written to work on the graphics card, as it works in a completely different way than the CPU. It is a lot faster, but not realtime, images still take a while to compute depending on what you want. iRay, Quicksilver, Furryball, Octane for example are GPU offline renderers.
Gaming cards:
Pro: Cheap. Compatible with everything (in case of Nvidia), good for gaming, great performance in most areas.
Cons: If you do heavy GPU offline rendering they're not as good with heat as workstation cards. Less memory means your scenes will be limited in size. 1-2gb is enough for the most demanding games though
They will also get slightly less performance in some area's of viewport rendering (NOT in games obviously).
Workstations cards:
Pro: Better cooling. More up to abuse of prolonged rendering. They'll probably live longer than gaming cards if/when used heavily.
They have more onboard memory, which is only really usefull for heavy scenes that need to be offline-gpu rendered.
Better with some areas of viewport rendering. More specifically, they'll deal easier with many objects, wireframes, displaying things like proxies and probably displaying many standard Max materials. Hard to say since I've never used them, but I have tried running benchmarks meant for these cards, and this is the sort of stuff they test in there.
Cons: PRICE! They are extremely expensive for the performance.
Compatibility: drivers might be out of date, not work with newer games. In the case of ATi I wouldn't trust them at all with viewport shaders since even the gaming cards can be very shoddy in that area.
So if you're going to do viewport rendering stuff in Max or Maya, with a shader like mine, with only a few objects, get a gaming card, Nvidia if you don't want to potentially regret your purchase.
If you're gonna use engines like UDK or Cryengine, get a gaming card (it's what they're for).
If you want the best performance/price balance for allround use, get a gaming card.
If you very specifically want to use the increased viewport speed and quality with apps like AutoCad, Solidworks, or Max in case of archviz type of things and don't mind paying (a lot) more, get a workstation card.
If you are seriously into GPU accelerated offline rendering and use something like iRay or Octane and don't mind the dough again, get a workstation card.
Not at all. Thats like asking if a 700hp semi truck is going to run the 1/4 mile in the same time as a 700hp bike.
The cards are designed to do completely different things.
It's just like high-octane gasoline, gas companies have so many people believe it makes a difference, while it most probably does squat in your case...
My last job I had at Game Time Live in Chicago (no longer exist
I thought man this is going to be great. This super powerful card and I can do what I want in max, unity, udk, etc.. It was so far from the truth. It was noticeably slower then the 9800GTX (nvidia) I had at home at the time as far as frame rates go and rendering stuff real time.
I upgraded my home pc to a GTX570 and it's amazing. DX11 1gb+ of ram... Cuts through anything with no issues. Cost of it was only $350.00! HUGE PRICE DIFFERENCE.
I would say you should put your focus on a great CPU, lots of ram and a top of the line or close to it gaming card.
Like others mentioned here UNLESS you are doing lots of cad type stuff then you really wont benefit.
There will be no quality difference in your images if they are rendered between a GTX580 and a quadro card. They are going to look exactly the same in the end once they are rendered so keep that in mind.
I guess the biggest question for you is... What do you do on a daily basis and what are you going to use the pc for?
I was searching for a new GPU and now i know, i get a gamers card before a quatro or somethinge else.
for checking if the parts match i use: https://pcpartpicker.com/
http://www.migenius.com/products/nvidia-iray/iray-benchmarks-2015
This.
there are really good GPU renderer out there like redshift...
GPU acceleration is used in many video editing apps these days as well.
I still wouldn't recommend a workstation class GPU though. But 970/980 possibly even a 980 Ti if your work depends on something like rendering in Octane.
I expect GPU renderers to eventually overtake CPU renderers entirely, but CPU renderers are mature, stable, and can handle really complex scenes relatively gracefully.
Of course, this all depends on what you're doing. If you don't need 300 GB of textures for your scenes, you'll do fine with GPU-based renderers, and since GPUs get cheaper on a perf per dollar basis much more quickly than CPUs do it's not hard to see that GPUs are the future of rendering. But, unfortunately, we live in the present...