Mudbox x Video card
polycounter lvl 9
HI!
I'm new to the forum and was wondering if I could already ask a question for you all.
I've downloaded Mudbox 2012 to give it a try (I've started to learn just this month) and my computer is showing a little amount of lag when I just reach lvl 6 and a great deal of lag when I try the lvl 7.
Hereupon I think I should do something about that soon, (I'm on the verge of finishing my first model on Maya) because I don't wanna have to stop training due to a hardware issue.
With that in mind, I started searching and found out that Mudbox needs lots of memory, both in the computer and in the video card.
The real question is, should I buy another video card and make a crossfire (would double the video memory) or buy a new and faster card?
My configuration is:
I7 860
(2x2)4BG memory 1600mhz
Radeon HD5850
(Just forgot to say, I can't afford at the moment more than another HD5850, so if it's not enough I'm gonna have to wait until I do
)
I'm new to the forum and was wondering if I could already ask a question for you all.
I've downloaded Mudbox 2012 to give it a try (I've started to learn just this month) and my computer is showing a little amount of lag when I just reach lvl 6 and a great deal of lag when I try the lvl 7.
Hereupon I think I should do something about that soon, (I'm on the verge of finishing my first model on Maya) because I don't wanna have to stop training due to a hardware issue.
With that in mind, I started searching and found out that Mudbox needs lots of memory, both in the computer and in the video card.
The real question is, should I buy another video card and make a crossfire (would double the video memory) or buy a new and faster card?
My configuration is:
I7 860
(2x2)4BG memory 1600mhz
Radeon HD5850
(Just forgot to say, I can't afford at the moment more than another HD5850, so if it's not enough I'm gonna have to wait until I do
)
Replies
With the Basic Human body, without any modifications.
Do you think it's not going to be necessary?
Virtual memory to make it sound its flattest is parts of the hard drive used as if it were RAM.
Start > (right click) computer > properties > advanced system settings > Performance [Settings] > Advanced Tab > Virtual Memory [Change] > Custom Size, change as you see fit.
This is a temporary and less powerful solution but it can help at least.
What SPECIFICALLY is your graphics card? their usually released with different standards,
Mines the Nvidia GTX 260 / 896MB OCX
that way we will know how much GRAM your card has, and be able to judge if it needs a change.
Well, it's a Radeon Sapphire HD5850 Vapor-X
Exactly this model:
[ame]http://www.amazon.com/Sapphire-VAPOR-X-DisplayPort-PCI-Express-100282VXSR/dp/B003DVTWP2/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&qid=1306616762&sr=8-12[/ame]
1GB in most cases is the high end version, 512MB being the mainstream.
You could Crossfire it but I don't think its the best solution.
Like I said, the power of these programs is mostly in the CPU, if you can find something about the program using the graphics card processing or OpenCL then it might use the GPU power, but I doubt it.
For any more tips on the performance you'd need to ask someone else, I personally have no experience with mudbox, only zBrush.
I could easily switch to this program, since I'm only beginning at this!
I've been skimming over some forums and they all seem to complain about how hard zBrush is to get used to. I'd agree with this, but I'd also argue that it seems worth it.
But seeing as I have not used Mudbox that would be too biased of a review, I suggest you try the both of them and stay with whichever best suits you.
You could even test to see how many poly you can use in zBrush in comparison to Mudbox.
EDIT: rogue beat me to it
I'm going to try zbrush and save the money I'd use to buy the new hardware at least.
Outside of extremely high-end film work that's going to be showing closeups and using multiple 4k displacement maps, what the hell kind of high-poly model needs that many polygons?
For serials. Anything at that amount of polygons probably won't even show up on a game resolution bake.
On lvl 6 it gets a little lagged, in a way that is hard to go on with, when I zoom in, this is what I meant.
@Gustavo.Branco- since your fairly new to sculpting in mudbox im a bit more forgiving, however rogue one should not be giving you false information.
first things first, Mudbox's base layer starts at level-0 Zbrush starts at level-1. what this means is, if your on level 7 in mudbox thats equivalent to being at level 8 in zbrush.
secondly, if your base mesh is kept fairly low (reference the default base mesh) mudbox should use your base mesh as a LOD once it gets to higher subdivisions. i forget the exact amount, however if your base mesh exceeds that amount it wont use a LOD at higher levels.
thirdly, make sure the mesh your sculpting on has nice even quads and no funky ngons and tri's, although it will still work, its usually better to keep things clean. i say that because mudbox likes that and also because its very good practice.
That being said, Ive never had the need to go past level 5 on a single mesh...but that will depend heavily on your machine, this is why i don't think its correct to state as a fact that zbrush will run better than mudbox, as your machine setup may not be similar to another artist. what they perceive as application running better could just be a case of machine setup being more qualified to run a certain app.
i hope by keeping those things in mind you will see better performance, as they have drastically improved that in the 2012 release of mud.
I guarantee it wouldn't. Even on a character like Chell from Portal 2 that uses three or four 2048 maps, you'd never see details from a sculpt with more than about 16.7 million polygons, even with the most efficient UV map possible. 16.7 million is way overkill because of smooth shading and supersampling in normal map baking, not to mention that compression and anistropic filtering tends to eliminate some details in normal maps.
Gustavo.Branco, you don't need a better computer, you need more efficient modeling.
jam-i-am and Swizzle, thank you for your observations.
It just got me more excited to be started already!
I'm gonna stick to mudbox then, as it is the app used at my course.
I didn't know about the existence of SSD drives, it's amazing!
I'm using Windows 7 64 bit, and I already have a Raid 0 installed here.
With the money I was saving for this expense I could buy +8GB of memory,
or instead +4gb of memory and a SSD drive,
or yet a http://www.pichau.com.br/ecommerce_site/produto_20861_4109_HD-Seagate-Momentus-XT-500GB--7200-RPM--32MB-Cache--4GB-SSD---25--SATA-30Gb-s-com-NCQ-Solid-State-Hybrid-Drive-ST95005620AS and make a Raid with this HD and my other HDs, that I already have + 4GB memory.
What do you think?
Vidar:
This is conforting, I was hoping for this when I built my computer
Entity:
I meant the GPU.
When I researched for this card I read that this GPU was really easy to overclock, mainly because it's the Vapor-X edition, but for what it looks like, this is not going to be necessary for us :poly136: