Sorry if this is in the wrong forum, I couldn’t find anywhere else to post it…
I use an ATI Radeon 200 Xpress Series, which is obviously a very poor choice for blender (ATI has serious Open GL problems) I cheated my way out of the driver issues, but it still isn’t very effective for modelling. Does anyone know of a really good video card for blender? (Please also say the price). Thank you 
some one a while back asked the same exact question
and if i remember corecly the answer to that problem wasnt the video card, but your ram
(not 100% sure but i think thats what it was)
im running a cheap ati 9250 with 4gb of ram, 3.2 p4, and it gives me no problemsm at all (never had it lag for any reason)
I used always used to have problems with my ATI rage-based card so I decided my next card would be NVIDA. Was ok on W98, but worse after that.
My new computer had a stupid S3 card. I quickly got an NVIDA (gx5500) card. It works great, 5-10X faster framerate and literally sharpened the display! Card never has a problem (unlike the rest of the computer - taking it back).
I don’t recall anything about the problems being RAM, but rather the OGL driver support. I did try a new laptop last year with a ATI, I think it might have been a 200 card but maybe not. It seemed to work fine though. We’ll see if AMD fixes their OGL problems.
I have about a gig of ram, that’s enough to run a program like Blender. The video card runs well, but it can’t take anything high poly.
Thanks for the advice, guys 
it might be something as simple as an outdated driver
a lot of parts go into that, some people have blender running perfectly but render times are outragious for example
Hey,
You might want to consider the overall.
In a 3D application, here is what each part does:
CPU: Processes physics send render code to video card
(The faster your CPU, the faster your video card’s going to be able to display your animations on the screen)
Video Card: Processes the render code sent by the CPU, polygons etc.
(The faster your Video Card, the faster it’s going to be able to render the real time 3D previews)
RAM: Keeps in memory the render code sent by the CPU and interchanges data between the video card’s ram that holds the real time 3D data and the CPU that will then send new render code once the old one has been executed on your video card.
(the faster your ram, the quicker it’s going to be able to make 3D images refresh on the video card, the bigger your ram, the bigger quantity of data sent by the CPU it’s going to be able to hold)
Hard Drive: Delivers stored information to the RAM to send to the CPU and then be processed by the Video Card to display on the monitor.
(Particularly in video editing, the faster your hard drive, the faster stored files are sent to the RAM)
Motherboard: Makes the transfer link between everything.
(The faster the Motherboard, the faster everything works together)
Basically, remember that everything influences each other. Below is a set of cases in which one or more of the things above need to be replaced by better.
My software slows down when I get physics in the animation
(your CPU isn’t powerful enough)
(your RAM may not be fast enough to handle all the physics)
My software slows down when I have too much polygons
(your video card may not be fast enough or [more frequently] doesn’t have enough memory to handle all the data, putting it in queue on your RAM and then on your Hard Drive, slowing everything on the system)
(Your video card may not be fast enough to process the application’s 3D accelerator, in most cases OpenGL, NVidia is currently better at it)
My software slows down when I put textures
(Same then polygons)
Each time I start a tool, the process starts and then it blocks completely and starts to move normally again
(Your RAM isn’t fast enough to synchronize the first code of the process with the CPU and the Video Card)
Tip: If your computer has top notch devices and doesn’t perform, the motherboard may be the source of the problem since it wouldn’t be fast enough to handle all the transfers
Tip: A video card is extremely powerful in comparison to a processor (CPU). If you think you have to upgrade your video card, you may want to have a faster RAM, a faster CPU and a bigger video card memory to handle its tremendous power.
Take example on a Mac, some Macs have high RAM, high CPU, high everything except for video cards. Many people are fooled by this but the reality is the card is being exploited way better then a more powerful one. Keep in mind though that a more powerful video card with the same hardware is still better in anyway.
Tip: If you want a better rendering speed, don’t go for processors that handle tasks like a PowerPC (old Macs) or a AMD processor.
Here’s why:
A AMD or PowerPC processor are short pipeline processors.
This makes it harder to attain stronger processing speeds (ex: P4 3.2 Ghz equivalent of PPC 1.6 Ghz) but the processor stays faster to start processing code.
For example, some P4 are 26 pipeline and PPC are 4 pipelines, so the PPC is basically 6 times faster to start processing. But, the equivalent P4 processes at twice the speed, so eventually it will catch up and go further then the PPC in less time if they are both processing a long term process (renders).
So a short pipeline processor is better for short and immediate tasks (aka real time),
ex: Video Games, Decoding Videos
And a long pipeline processor is better for long and lenghty tasks,
ex: Rendering, Encoding Videos
Also, because long pipeline processors have a long pipeline, they can handle a much bigger data buffer, making them more suited for multitasking operations.
Short and Long pipeline processors are easy to recognize. Just ask your tech guy at a computer store what would be equivalent to let’s say a 3Ghz P4 for an AMD processor, and the lowest in processing power is the one with the shortest pipeline, in this case the AMD.
Short Pipeline Processors:
Intel Intanium, Intel Centrino, IBM PowerPC, AMD Athlon
Long Pipeline Processors: Intel Pentium, Intel Celeron, Intel Core Duo
And what’s more, this is the main reason Apple switched to Intel. IBM wasn’t able to deliver stronger processors for one, and PowerPC wasn’t a good processor to take the future trendy tasks of multi tasking. Also, Apple was loosing the 3D community to Microsoft.
Might I remember you C.E.O. or Apple Steve Jobs is also C.E.O. or Pixar, which started rendering and working with Windows because they had better suited processors.
Oh, I didn’t answered your question.
The best video card for Blender?
NVidia 6xxx series
for the newer ones I don’t know which wins in OpenGL, just go on www.hardware.fr or other review sites if you don’t speak french and watch the reviews and comparisions
Sorry to update this, but question:
Newer NVIDIA cards are slow at openGL, thus making Blender viewport a lot slower, right?
What other brand I should seriously look into to get the best viewport and GPU rendering (Cycles) performance? I want a new card.
Come on mods, this site clearly needs an auto lock feature. Every other forum I’m on has it and this resurrecting of obsolete threads isn’t a problem.
FreeMind, what stopped you from starting a new thread? What benefit did you see in resurrecting a thread from 2006?
Of for that matter using the forum search, looking into one of the ~10-15 recent threads about the very same topic, or my dozend page long threads on the topic, grinding the issue down to the bone.
I was using Google search and this one was first in the list.