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Most compatible graphics card for Maya 2008?

Hello,

I've recently been having a few technical issues with Maya...
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=57896

I'm considering buying a new computer setup, therefore...
Is there anyone out there who can recommend me a consumer graphics card that works well with Maya 2008?

Any help would be appreciated!:)

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  • EarthQuake
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    The thing is, Maya dosent officially support any "consumer" card, so if you cant afford a quadro, or a firegl, you're basically shit out of luck. Atleast thats how i understand it. Its pretty fucking unacceptable to me, that nearly every nvidia or ati card you would actually find in a workstation in game production has some sort of glitches with maya.
  • pixelmitherer
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    Hey thanks EarthQuake.

    This is what I feared, I used to believe it was ati cards that Maya had problems with, but recently I've had more and more problems with the nVidia I currently have at the moment.:(
  • EarthQuake
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    We've used these cards at our studio, and all have had pretty much the same viewport issues(viewports will stop rendering after a while, or jsut render total garbage in them).

    nvidia 6800, 7600, 7800, 7950, 8600 gt, 8800 gt
    and a few random ati cards, i think x800, and hd3600?

    allllll of them have issues, fuck maya!
  • Slingshot
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    Slingshot polycounter lvl 17
    "Maya dosent officially support any "consumer" card, so if you cant afford a quadro, or a firegl, you're basically shit out of luck."

    Yup this is true I am working on a computer with a 7950 512MB nvidia and it will freak out by having my screen flicker the model I am working on my screen because I found out that my graphics card does not refresh my screen enough or some bull to this order.

    By pressing my space bar twice to go in-out of the quad menu it will refresh my screen fix it until it happens again. WTF kind of fix is that.

    All of the quadro graphics cards from what I understand Autodesk had Nvidia make a custom driver for these specific graphics cards and that's why they work for, from what I have read anyway.
  • MoP
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    MoP polycounter lvl 18
    Yes, pretty much everyone I've heard on Maya 8+ gets the "flickering viewport" bug.

    What I've found fixes this fairly consistently (or at least reduces the occurrence) on NVidia cards is to disable "Threaded Optimisation" in the Manage 3D Settings section of the NVidia Control Panel. Add an application profile for Maya, select the .exe file and set Threaded Optimisation to Off.
  • rebb
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    rebb polycounter lvl 17
    Check this post on the Autodesk Area, maybe this helps with the viewport flicker problems : http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/forums/viewthread/19943/ .
    The thing is, Maya dosent officially support any "consumer" card
    I really wonder why the viewport in Maya would be oh so much more complex than the rendering engine in a modern 3D Game. Maybe they just didn't touch the core renderer code since 2000 or something. :|
  • pixelmitherer
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    Hey thanks all for the help, interesting (and a bit depressing) stuff.

    Something that I've found is that Maya 2008 seems (well for me anyway) to run better on an older card that I use, GeForce 6200 than on the GeForce 7900 gtx.

    Don't know if anyone else has found that?
  • renderhjs
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    renderhjs sublime tool
    perhaps a dated core :p
  • funshark
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    funshark polycounter lvl 16
    It seems that the 7000+ geforce cards brought with them some annoying issues...
    But it seems too that some people don't have any problem with.

    For my case :
    - geforce 5700 : no problem ( maya 7, maya 8 )
    - geforce 8600 : problems ( maya 7, 8, 8.5, 2008 )
    - geforce 260 and new motherboard and ram : problems ( maya 7, 8, 8.5, 2008, 2009 )

    I'm speaking about the refresh issue here.

    There is one thing I have never changed in my config : AMD core; never had INTEL one.
    There is another thing that may have an effect : dual screen.
    But I have tried my 8600 with one screen and the problem was still there.

    strangely, some people don't have any issue with the same geforce 260 card, same drivers, only one screen and INTEL core.
    I really don't see what the INTEL thing can change here... but I don't understand in the same way why the same card work with some guys and not with others.

    Maybe we can post our hardware configurations to see if anything similar can cause the shit ?
    What do you think?
  • pior
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    pior grand marshal polycounter
    I had the opposite happen to me over the last week - some ".0.1" update of Nvidia drivers magically made Maya 2009 glitch free for the first time in months.
    I tried a badass fireGL earlier but it was crawling when trying to run complex shaders.

    In that regard I'd recommend a decent Nvidia.
  • Blaizer
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    Blaizer interpolator
    A quadro fx 1700 is as expensive as a gtx280 here, and talking about 3d apps... i had to buy a quadro fx 3500 due to the bad perfomance i with consumer cards in Max, something really pathetic for a mayor 3d program. Now with my quadro and maxtreme drivers i can handle 20 millions of polygons like they were nothing. It's a good choice to work, but very bad to play :D.

    With other programs such as Modo, with a crappy 8400gs i can handle more polygons faster than with the quadro, it's incredible. With the combo apps Modo+Zbrush you don't need a workstation graphic card like quadro for serious things.

    So i also recommend a decent nvidia, but a medium range quadro if you are going to need its perfomance with programs like Max.
  • Ryno
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    Ryno polycounter lvl 18
    EarthQuake wrote: »
    The thing is, Maya dosent officially support any "consumer" card, so if you cant afford a quadro, or a firegl, you're basically shit out of luck. Atleast thats how i understand it. Its pretty fucking unacceptable to me, that nearly every nvidia or ati card you would actually find in a workstation in game production has some sort of glitches with maya.

    This has always bugged the hell out of me. I remember talking to Autodesk about this several years ago in regards to Max. At that time, Max didn't officially support any consumer gaming cards. They seemed very clueless as to why the hell I would want to do that. It went something like this:

    AD: Why would you want to use a consumer gaming card instead of a professional card?

    Me: Because games are based on Direct X. Nearly all games run on DX, which almost no professional cards support. I don't want to have to use two machines to be able to model/texture, and do level work.

    AD: I hadn't even thought of that.

    Me: Do you realize how many of your customers are actually game artists that use Max on a daily basis compared to post houses, Architecture, and others? And that ALL of these game artists use consumer gaming cards?

    AD: ... We'll have to look into this.

    Later on a couple of their tech guys and some of their supported graphics card partner company tech guys started asking me questions. They started shitting bricks when they realized that Direct X support was the primary consideration for game artists.

    AD: So you don't even USE Open GL?

    Me: Nope. Open GL pushes polys great, but that's not the main concern in games. I need to see dozens or hundreds of textures in viewport at the same time. Preferrably with specularity, bump/normal maps, etc.

    AD: We can't do that with Open GL

    Me: Exactly

    They were actually pretty cool after that and asked me a bunch of questions, giving me their cards and asking if they could e-mail me with more question. I told them that they could talk to any experienced game artist and get the same information.
  • MoP
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    MoP polycounter lvl 18
    Ryno, dig out those business cards, see if those guys are still with Autodesk, and get them to tell the same damn thing to the Maya programmers! :)
  • pixelmitherer
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    Ryno: Yeah I've heard conversations like that one before!:)


    Here's the specs for my problem machine...

    Dell intel pentium 4
    cpu 3.20
    2gb of ram
    duel monitors

    geforce 7900gtx 512mb ram
    forceware: 83.91


    got the oppurtunity to try out a quadro fx, gonna give this a go see if it makes any difference.
  • claydough
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    claydough polycounter lvl 10
    dual monitors,
    does it react better if u don't use the second monitor fer the maya ui? ( I used the second monitor fer jes mel command reference and textpad. )

    haven't had a dual monitor fer awhile tho. have had nothing but good experience with many ATI and Nvidia cards.

    I thought the overlay option only affected the UI ( hypershade, attribute editor, etc... and not viewport )
    years ago I think it was heavily tied to paint effects as well. But if I remember right that was fixed??

    otherwise did u try the env fix fer overlay mentioned in the area thread?
    MAYA_GEFORCE_SKIP_OVERLAY=1
    
  • funshark
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    funshark polycounter lvl 16
    pixelmitherer : just try with single monitor?
  • breakneck
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    breakneck polycounter lvl 13
    I have the EVGA GeForce 9800 GTX + and maya works "ok". I do have random crash problems when i try to select a 500,000 + tri mesh (however this hasn't happened recently).
    I also run dual screen, and have experienced crashing if a specific window is open in the secondary monitor. I only use my main monitor now, and no problems.

    Viewport is crappy flicker style though, no matter if in default or high quality mode.
  • Junkie_XL
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    Junkie_XL polycounter lvl 14
    Marquee selection in max 2009 is slow and choppy. First version I've seen that done. I still work in 2008 because it pisses me off so much. Hopefully the evil powers that be at Autodesk aren't purposely crippling us geforce peeps with max now too...
  • warby
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    warby polycounter lvl 18
    except for that one ati x400 ( ? ) card i once had that wouldn't show normal maps in high quality render mode, i never had a problem with maya and consumer graphics cards maya pretty much supports all graphics cards perfectly !

    at my job in boston at wmi we actually had one quadro card laying around and pop that in to see if its gives us a performance boost in maya over a gamer nvidia card but it was a complete joke it actually performed marginally worse than the graphics card that cost 2000 dollars less :D
  • Junkie_XL
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    Junkie_XL polycounter lvl 14
    warby wrote: »
    except for that one ati x400 ( ? ) card i once had that wouldn't show normal maps in high quality render mode, i never had a problem with maya and consumer graphics cards maya pretty much supports all graphics cards perfectly !

    at my job in boston at wmi we actually had one quadro card laying around and pop that in to see if its gives us a performance boost in maya over a gamer nvidia card but it was a complete joke it actually performed marginally worse than the graphics card that cost 2000 dollars less :D

    The GPU may have been worse, but doesn't the backbuffer support actually make things a much more flicker-free & less glitchy experience?
  • thomasp
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    thomasp hero character
    you'd think so.

    as a 'light' maya user i do not stumble over display issues that result from abusing the cgfx plugin or hardware 'best' render too much but there are terrible refresh issues in 2008 when running multiple displays in dual view mode. you can fix those by switching to horizontal span mode (which is inconvenient for me to use due to the apps i spend more time in during the day, so i just restart maya every five minutes instead...). supposedly this is fixed in 2009 now with the env variable posted by claydough.
  • pixelmitherer
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    Hello, Just a little update on my problems...

    Warby: at my job in boston at wmi we actually had one quadro card laying around and pop that in to see if its gives us a performance boost in maya over a gamer nvidia card but it was a complete joke it actually performed marginally worse than the graphics card that cost 2000 dollars less

    Yep, tried a Quadro FX 3450/4000, it was a lot worse, causing many irritating problems in the UV editor.:poly127:

    Then changed to an nVidia geForce 7800GTX. Probably the best I have tried, but still suffers from the 'white texture display' in the UV Editor that I was previously getting sometimes. Rendering it unusable!

    I have tried using a single monitor setup also but it mostly results in the same problems I was experiencing. Doesn't seem to make much difference:poly117:

    I'm out of ideas on this one!
  • warby
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    warby polycounter lvl 18
    can you show me a screenshot of the uv editor with the image drop down menu expanded and the image range info box clicked please ?! :)

    i still think that you have some quirky setting and its not a hardware issue
  • pixelmitherer
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    Hey Warby,

    Thanks for taking a look for me.
    Here it is.....

    UvImageProb-1.jpg
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