Well as I have become more interested in blender and building my own models I’ve found my old Geforce MX to be sorely lacking. Therefore, I started down the road to determining what the next best card is for me.
Granted I don’t want to go much above $300 dollars, I’m interested in what your thoughts are on the matter.
I’ve got a plenty powerful machine (dual p4 xeons (2.4Ghz), 1 Gig DDR, etc), however I only run Linux, therefore compatibility does become an issue. This has lead me to consider NVIDIA’s line, in particular the Quadro FX500.
What are your thoughts on the matter? Should I try that card, or perhaps go ATI? Any suggestions?
idk man, but stay away from the MATROX G550, its going to get destroyed, heres the best part, its the viedo card i wanted most for my video editing, nice dual screens, and u can zoom fo rthe other screen, buncha nice stuff, but it runs blender for sh*t
You shouldn’t need to go above $50 (geforce 2 MX) because blender doesn’t use that much of the new features video cards have
yet
so get something with good drivers. It is hard to fail with nvidia (but the FX series seems to be inferior to the new ati cards in power).
I haven’t tried any ati cards. I have a geforce 2 MX pci (my old computers didn’t have agp slots), and blender runs fine. If it doesn’t it has found a way to use my ram (unlikely, well maybe with too many spot lamps with the buffer too high) or my cpu (radiosity or metaballs come to mind, the latter more annoying because they have to recalculated).
BTW, my system (this one) is a athlon xp 2000 running at 1250Mhz (underclocked until I buy new ram), with 256 Mb of (sd)ram.
You shouldn’t need to go above $50 (geforce 2 MX) because blender doesn’t use that much of the new features video cards have
Interesting, I just got a very impressive .blend from a friend of mine and it’s remarkably slow to work with. Rendering is a snap, as that’s a function of CPU, but the wireframe redraw is 100% video card, or so I was lead to believe.
Tom’s hardware used blender as a benchmark through the wireframe and w draw values.
Essentially meausures of how fast and reactive the redraw is on the screen.
I just figured a more snappy video card would increase the speed of that process.
dittohead, I’ve got to agree with you, I do like NVIDIA for their attempts at linux support.
stay AWAY from the new NVidia cards, unless its the GeForce4 TI or the FX 5900
The rest of the FX cards well…stink. read ANY review to see what I mean.
for the under 300$ budget, go for a ATI 9800 non pro, its the fastest card for the least amount of money. (I upgraded from a GeForce 3ti) I spent about four months researching this, and in the end, ATI was the clear winner.
The 5900 Ultra is a VERY good card, but at 500$, well…no chance can I afford it. the 9800 Pro 128 meg version is another VERY good card, and a little more affordable, but in the end, the 9800 non pro is cheaper then the 9700 Pro, has more features, and runs faster then ANY card with the exception of the 9800 Pro, and the FX 5900 Ultra.
Final Vote:
If you can afford a FX5900 Ultra, (at 500$) go for it, otherwise go for the cheaper ATI cards, the 9700 to 9800 cards rock. if you can hold off about ohh…a month, the 9900 series will be out, and the 9800 series will be cheaper.
oh, and if your worried about Drivers, ATI has REALLY cleaned up its act, new drivers are available all the time.
I run with the NVidia Geforce 4 TI on one PC and a GeForce 2 on MX on another. Both run Blender very well. As the machine run at 1.4 and 1.8, the card are no bottlenecks.
I have also a Firewire card to capture and output DV video (720x480 NTSC). Great for getting reference, backgrounds and export to tape final animations.
Myabe I buy it 