PC Graphics Card Preference

[Haydenovative]

Hi Guys,

I have been tasked with upgrading our main Vectorworks machine's Graphics card for pushing out renders. It is a Intel Xeon 2,67GHz CPU with 6GB Ram running Windows 7 Professional. I will be increasing the RAM to 16GB. I have heard that non-professional Gaming Graphics cards yield the best results when dealing with renders. Could I get your opinions on what might be the best way to go? Thanks team!

[grant_PD]

I like the Nvidia cards. The gaming ones do work just fine, cheaper than the quadro series.

Your question is a bit misleading though. The graphics card does nothing for the renders, unless you are talking about rendering in open GL. All other renderings are done by the processor, so if that's what you're talking about, you're going to be looking more for processing power, not graphics card power.

[PVA - Admin]

Graphics cards will only affect OpenGL speed currently, but will directly affect wireframe and top/plan speed (more than it does now) soon.

Renders performed using Renderworks modes are all purely dependent on the CPU only for the foreseeable future.

Grant is correct, cards geared more towards gaming work as well as well if not better than the cards marketed towards "Workstations" or CAD in general and are significantly cheaper. For example Nvidia's GeForce series and AMD's Radeon series are much better choices than their Quadro and FirePro lines, respectively, as far as price vs performance goes.

[Haydenovative]

Thanks so much Guys!

I may have really dodged a bullet there, This is why forums rock! Ill do some more homework.... Legends!

[grant_PD]

From your signature it looks like what you really need is RAM. VW will multi thread the rendering process but your processor is pretty great right now. You could go dual processors but now you're talking big bucks.

[PVA - Admin]

^This.

For a 4c/8t Xeon you'll want around 8GB of RAM or more. A good rule of thumb is 1GB per core(thread).