CARMELHILL Posted December 31, 2008 Share Posted December 31, 2008 Can anyone tell me if there is a huge time savings when using a high end Nvidia Quadro FX video card as compared to a lower end GeForce 6 or 7 series? Is there only a differenc ewhen using Renderworks or does it speed generic drafting also? DO you think it's worth the crazy difference in price? I saw some Quadro cards for $1500 and $2000. Sounds nuts to me. Quote Link to comment
IanH Posted December 31, 2008 Share Posted December 31, 2008 (edited) Renderworks rendering uses the CPU rather than graphics card to do its computations. So a nice new graphics card will have little or no difference in renderworks rendering times. I suspect that the standard render modes (hidden line etc), except OpenGL will also fall in to the little/no improvement. OpenGL and standard GUI (including drafting) operations do make use of the graphics card capabilities, more so with 2009. So a new card may well give improved performance with these operations. However, if your previous graphics card is under specced, then you are likely to find an improvement with a newer graphics card, but going high end is unlikely to give a value for money improvement compared to a well chosen 'gaming' card. Edited December 31, 2008 by IanH Quote Link to comment
monkey Posted January 5, 2009 Share Posted January 5, 2009 i recently bought a BFG Nvidia 9500 GT 1GB card for around ?60 (probably about $100-$120), which was an upgrade from a 256MB integrated card, and this made a huge difference to my drafting etc (which was poor to begin with due to an integrated card), but little difference with rendering, a bit quicker but not that much. I did look at the high end cards and contemplated it for a second until i saw the price!!! i tend to use my machine for gaming as well as CAD work, and have found this lower end card does the job really well. I know there are newer lower end cards out now from Nvidia so they might be worth checking out. you have to be careful when buying cards as some of the lower spec ones do not offer pixel shading, open GL, and a few other things which are important when using CAD software, especially VW. Quote Link to comment
Jodyb17 Posted January 5, 2009 Share Posted January 5, 2009 Don't spend more than a couple hundred on a graphics card for VW. Any more would be a waste in my opinion. Quote Link to comment
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