I have one simple question : does the type of videocart you have affect the performance of blender. So is buying a new 3d card (for example a GForce 7800 GT) a good way to increase Blender’s performance?
The video card is only usefull when working with the 3d interface (while modeling etc). ITs totally useless when rendering. It will most likely help if you have a 1 000 000 vertice scene but thats why we have layers. I work with a ati radeon 9200 se 128 mb and its fines. I do have a 2.8GHtz and 512 ram (and also because I am a gamer…Half Life 2 runs fine too)
Yes graphics/video cards do have an impact on blenders performance and operation. Blender works best with Nvidia chipsets, not to say that it won’t work on ATI (I personally have an ATI Radeon 9600).
As with any program that is heavily dependent on graphics ability including gpu speed, pipelines, etc. a better graphics card will run it better. However heed the warning that newer model graphics cards often contain bugs that even testing and development missed. Trust me when I say that there are people here using graphics cards that would surprise you in there ability.
That being said, Graphics Cards help in the viewport, when your acutally modelling and editing, as that is a real time operation, though RAM and processor speed are also a major part of this. However when it comes to rendering Graphics Cards do not bear as much load, as most rendering operations are performed by your processor or RAM, not by the GPU. For instance, I used to have an S3 graphics card, that was crappy as hell (and eventually just broke), but I could still render fast images because my processor and RAM were good.
In summation, yes you might see better performance, but for much better performance go with more RAM.
There are plenty of topics around here about optimal hardware, and I’ve probably misworded something here, so look around and take the averages of everything.
Take a look at:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=44783
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=23199&highlight=blender+hardware
Use the search function and look at posts involving “Blender Hardware”
Good luck, and be sure to research before making the investment!
THx for the advice ppl!
Greetz, Fritz.