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The difference of a great video card?


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Hi all,

I was thinking of doing a hardware upgrade, but one of the biggest issues is slow refresh in wireframe mode if I have complex 3D geometry. Instead of upgrading the machine, what about spending some money on a great video card.

In your opinion, will a new, more high performance video card effect performance in:

1. Open GL Rendering (Speed, and Quality).

2. Wireframe refresh

Or are these issues processor dependent? I currently have an ATI Radeon 9600 XT, standard in the Dual G5 2.5

Thanks!

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  • 2 weeks later...

I just asked an Apple technician:

It used to be the processor that did all or almost all the rendering. The video card wasn't essential.

Nowadays most cad applications(Archicad the 2 latest versions - VW - no idea) uses the video card to do a big part of the job. Therefore they recommend video cards with 1Gb memory now available if you want to be on top...Not cheap but fun.

Whether it applies to VW he couldn't tell.

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My understanding:

The video card does all opengl rendering for the screen and printing.

The CPU does all other Vectorworks tasks.

Renderworks utliizes multiple CPU's/core.

All other parts of Vectorworks currently utilize a single core.

If you don't use opengl, then the video card won't impact speed much.

If you don't use renderworks the benefits of multiple cores will be at the operating system level, not from the Vectorworks application.

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