what graphics card for hardcore blender

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

Hi, I am wondering what graphics card to get for blender. The blender web site says that i should get a Open GL Graphics Card with 768 MB Ram, ATI FireGL or Nvidia Quadro. Does it have to be FireGL or Quadro? there are alot better, cheaper cards out there. What card is better in general ati or nvidia? links?

2

Hi, the best one you can afford with lots of ram :slight_smile: Where at on the blender site does it say? Lots of stuff on the website is a bit dated now.

We were just testing sculpting 60 million quads on a computer, and the graphics card was the weak link.

3
4

I have an old Gef7600 with damaged video mem and I am a hardcore Blender user. :slight_smile:

5

It depends on what you want to do with it, for many things an older card like endis is fine. As I said though, there are things like sculpting at ridiculous numbers of polys that will bring even the current top end cards to their knees.

6

The FireGL and Quadro cards were recommended for a production environment. Meaning professional content, similar to the open movie projects.

The level of hardware you need depends on the type and detail in the content you want to create. If you’re just doing this as a hobby, a cheap card will suit your needs fine and give you the ability to learn and have fun with the program. Don’t go too cheap, though.

Generally speaking, choose the best card you can afford. You can always work with lower-end hardware, but that higher-end card can make your workflow feel that much smoother.

7

It is worth getting Quadro cards for some applications, but Blender is not one of them. They are generally just GeForce cards with different firmware. I’d go to a site like the following and compare different models, and select one that has good performance for the money. Sometimes a VAR will try to upsell you to a better model with only slightly better performance:

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/

Me. I have an old laptop (Core2 Duo) with a Nvidia GeForce 8600M and it works very nicely. My desktop, i7 920 with a GeForce GTX 260, is a lot faster but I still work mostly on my trusty old laptop.

Harley