William Powell, AIA

quote: Originally posted by jnr: With ram at significantly lower prices, buy as much as you can fit in your machine. Video ram is relative to the size of the monitor. Thanks for your responce. Do you mean system ram, in the first sentence? I may double what I have, but I thought getting a video card with more dedicated ram for video would make the most improvment in 3D, open-gl and rendering. I bought a 32Mb ATI card and unfortunatly it hasn't made much difference yet - I'll ask ATI about that.

I want to update my PC to improve video display and rendering - speed and quality. 1)Suggestions about the optimun type of new card that would work best with VW8(or 9)/Architect w/ RenderWorks for OpenGL, etc.? 2) Would more system RAM help also? 3) Also, if a project file (.mcd) gets bigger than 3mgs it starts slowing down (refresh rate, etc.) (I purge unused symbols and textures - that cuts a lot out) 4) I'd always heard that MiniCAD/VW didn't need as "big" a system to run as the competition - is that realily true??? I have a 3 yr. old (DELL) 400mhz Pentium II with 128mgs of 100mhz ECC RAM (which I could double). The only video card I could get with the system back then was a STB Velocity (Nvidia Riva 128). It is AGP-able but has only 4mgs of on-board RAM. Thanks! ------------------ BILL