Worth upgrading video card?

[hrgiger]

I just wondered where my video card makes a difference the most in Lightwave. I assume it helps with redraw speed in modeler and fps in Layout. What I want to know specifically, if it will speed up the ineractivity while animating characters as in manipulating multiple characters or those with expressions as part of the rig setup (as in ACS4). Right now, animating with one character is pretty good in Layout but two or more starts to get a little unbearable. I'm still just using the cheap card that came with the system but I was trying to decide if it was worth upgrading. I guess I would mostly like to hear from those who do a bit of animation themselves and have upgraded their cards. I want to know what kind of improvements you've had.

Thanks for any info you can give.

Steve

[Freak]

Not really going to help with LW's Expression slowdown...
However it will of course make a difference to all OGL speeds,
And will help with multiple characters.

It depends on the card your using now...

Memory amount, Memoryspeed, Bandwidth and Clockspeeds are what counts...Don't be fooled by marketing, just read the stats of each card.

Usually try and skip 2 or 3 generations of Videocards,
for the price, CPU and Ram is usually a much better investment.

Videocards are way overpriced for what they do, and are really made to play games.... (sad but true)

The minor performance difference between a GF4MX and the latest Quadro cards, in no way reflects the massive price difference that they command.

I'm hoping that NT really did do some work with Nvidia this time around, because the semi and pro 3D markets are way ignored,
compared to games players..... When was the last time Nvidia
tweaked their drivers for us LW users? (NEVER!) But they adjust their drivers to suit whatever game is being used to benchmark, at the time, at the cost of slowing our LW OGL speeds...

LW 7.5 still ignores much of the OGL advantages that XSI and Max allow, And most cards these days are tuned for DX over OGL anyway.

[mattclary]

Steve, I hardly do any animation, but I've used LW with a 3D Labs Oxygen VX1, a Geforce 3 TI 500, a Geforce 4 TI 4200, and now a Wildcat VP 970. When modeling with high poly or high sub-d objects, I just haven't seen a huge difference in any of these cards. Every time I've expected to see a large improvement and it's just never materialized. Also within that time frame, I've ranged from a dual celeron to a P4 3ghz with a gig of ram, so it's not a lack of CPU/memory either. LW just doesn't exploit OpenGL as well as it could, IMO. I'd probably stick with what you have, or at least, don't spend a bundle.

[tasmanian]

I used to have a Geforce256 card. From that I went to a Geforce 4 TI 4600. There definitely is a speed difference when animating multiple characters or moving around very detailed scenery. To say that it is spectacular is overdoing it though.
At work I had to make do for a while with a Matrox G550. This card is not really suited for LW and that really showed, even my old Geforce256 did a lot better.
The conclusion seems to be that it's more important to have a LW friendly gfx chip (like the nvidia) than having the faster version of that chip.

[hrgiger]

I actually figured this much as so....:(

I noticed a great speed difference in rendering of course when I moved from my 850MHZ PIII to my P4 2.4GHZ and some general all around speed improvements but did not see a significant change (at least what I'd hoped for) speed in interactivity while animating.

Thanks for your feedback. Looks like I'll just grin and bear it for right now...I need to save my money for LW8 anyways.