Which video cards does blender like?

[mugwah]

Invested in a ATI Radeon 9600 but blender does not appear to like it. The published list of acceptable video cards is out of date. What is the groups recommendation for must-have cards? Any we should avoid?

[G_Man]

Well, Blender is writen in OpenGL, so any card with strong support for that should work fine.

In my experience most all Nvidia cards have done wonders for me ATM I have a Gforce 2 and it is alright, but I've just scored my self a Geforce 4 ti4600 and it should be arriving in the next few days.

As for why your ATI isn't working? ... what is wrong with it, what do you mean by "blender does not appear to like it"? ... have you tried installing the latest drivers?

[z3r0 d]

Originally Posted by mugwah Invested in a ATI Radeon 9600 but blender does not appear to like it. The published list of acceptable video cards is out of date. What is the groups recommendation for must-have cards? Any we should avoid?

How is blender not liking it?

I now have an ati radeon 9600 (se) and it works best if international fonts are turned off, and turning off antialiasing and anistropic filtering (in advanced settings on the settings tab of display properties) makes it usuable.

it sometimes seems less responsive than my former geforce 2 MX, which is odd.

(and I can't get it to work in linux, fatal errors on running blender, which I can find, but escape me at the moment)

[theeth]

It's not odd at all. ATI is reknowned for having bad 2D openGL support which is all over the place in Blender.

Martin

[Rangel]

Well, I got Blender on 2 Windows machines:
- one with a NVidia GeForce 2 MX 440 32 MB
- the other with a NVidia GeForce 4 Ti 128MB
and Blender runs very well on both, specially on the GeForce4 Ti.

It seems to me that the Blender bottleneck is not on graphics display (great, by the way; very fast) but on the CPU handling the points data on heavy models.
Another very good option would be the NVidia Quadro line (might even be overkill...)

Alexandre Rangel

[Fatbob]

Well Blender seems to like my Radeon 8500. I assume you are using the latest Catalyst 3.8 drivers? If not give them a try.

Also, if you previously had an nVidia card installed, this may be a cause for your problems. It's a pretty well know issue that having any remnants of nVidia drivers causes ATi cards to no work properly. I know of several people that have switched from a GeForce3 or 4 to a 9700 or 9800, only to find that the new ATi card is actually slower than there older nVidia card, then after formating there PC (yes I know it's quite extreme), and installing clean ATi drivers, their new system was running perfectly.

You might not have to re-format your PC, but you must remove any trace of nVidia's driver.

Hope that helps!

[Save]

I tried an ATI Radeon 7200 but it worked ver bad also with new installed drivers.
Now I have a Nvidia Ge force 4 FX 5200 and it works, perfectly!

Bye,
save

[g_M_e]

my Radeon 9600 XT runs blender like poo. I tried the suggestions z3r0 d gave, but I can't find those options in advanced. I'm not a hardware n00ber, but... %| good thing I have another pc with an FX 5900 works great.

[z3r0 d]

Originally Posted by g_M_e my Radeon 9600 XT runs blender like poo. I tried the suggestions z3r0 d gave, but I can't find those options in advanced. I'm not a hardware n00ber, but... %| good thing I have another pc with an FX 5900 works great.

display properties
settings tab
advanced settings button
3d tab
opengl settings radio button
(the default slider setting [dead center] works fine, it has aa and af set to application something, which for blender means off)

[sector0]

My radeon 8500 (maybe LE not sure) has really weird problems. It seems to come from the multiple displays. If I have my tv plugged in and run blender it will cause all the text to scrunch up on buttons and stuff until it is unusable (unless you know all the shortcuts) If I turn off the tv in the display settings blender opens fine but then dies after it renders once. I have to turn off the tv, open blender, then re-enable the tv. Lol, maybe if I stand on one foot and touch my nose to my stomach it will work better. I haven't tried a new build on my machine at home yet, so maybe it works better (using the main build on blender.org) Also, I have only tried blender in windows on that machine, not sure how it will work on my redhat 9 disk.

[g_M_e]

z3r0,

I found those options, i'll try them out at home. Coincidentally, I have blender at work and I have an 9600 256MB card here with no problems with it. Its even running in direct 3D :S Could it be related to the fact that my pc at home is AMD 64? I wouldn't imagine so, but...

[quailman]

Originally Posted by sector0 it will cause all the text to scrunch up on buttons and stuff until it is unusable

Possible solution: turn off anti-aliased fonts. I have no idea if it will actually work, but I had the same problem (for different reasons) and non-aa text displays properly.

[theeth]

Originally Posted by g_M_e Its even running in direct 3D :S

ah ah! Funniest thing I ever heard.

Blender running in direct 3D %|

Martin

[g_M_e]

hehe, its the default for the card and I haven't had any problems with blender so far, so I didn't even think about it. But let your laughing cease as I did change it to OpenGL

[nico]

muaha... I will not comment on that. But something tells me teeth knows what he is talking about.

My 2 cents:
Blenderhead, don't you buy ATI, buy nVidia.

[theeth]

Originally Posted by g_M_e hehe, its the default for the card and I haven't had any problems with blender so far, so I didn't even think about it. But let your laughing cease as I did change it to OpenGL

Whatever your card default to is irrelevent, Blender just doesn't use Direct3D.

Martin

[g_M_e]

you'd know better than me. Why has z3r0 suggested changing from D3D to OpenGL in the properties then? How does that effect Blender? For what you're saying, it doesn't.

[z3r0 d]

Originally Posted by g_M_e you'd know better than me. Why has z3r0 suggested changing from D3D to OpenGL in the properties then? How does that effect Blender? For what you're saying, it doesn't.

The ATI advanced settings, 3d tab, uses a radio button to switch which settings you are changing

umm

it can store different settings for opengl and directx applications, you need to select opengl to change the settings that would affect blender

(bad ui decision I think, to use a radio button there)

[kosstheory]

I've tried out blender with this card and it works great...

Smooth as can be, even with highly detailed models.

My system is an old athlon 1.2 ghz with a gig of pc133 ram, nothing too special...

and I run win 2k.

[A2597]

9800 Pro here, no problems.
Blender does NOT like the 3.10 drivers, use the 3.9 drivers for all ATI cards.