What features are important for a video card for LW?

[starbase1]

I'm trying to understand what features of a video card are important for lightwave use, and maybe other graphics progs too - I have no interest in games.

It's not like performance is an issue (is it?), and cards in magazines are often rated on the rate they do stuff. I'm guessing that a lot of memory is good, so they can hold lots of detailed textures for the previews.

But what other features should I look for that will make my Lightwave experience more pleasant?

(And while I am at it, is there any way of losing the jagged seam on the preview of a spherical mapped texture!)

Nick

[starbase1]

Thanks for such a very detailed response, I will certainly use your advice to choose the card!

:thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:

[JBT27]

This is very useful advice - we've always tended to buy Quadro cards with new systems and I'm a bit red-faced over doing so when I read this kind of info.

That said, we have never had any significant problems day to day with OGL performance, but on the other side adding a decent Quadro rockets the price of those new systems.

Julian.

[Litebright]

I have an older motherboard with an AGP 8X slot. It seems all of the NVIDIA chipsets that are mentioned above are PCI-Express cards. Wouldn't an ATI Radeon HD3850 512mb 256-bit GDDR3 AGP 8X card (or something along those lines) be just as good? At least ATI has fairly new cards still available for use with AGP slots..

[prospector]

It's the pci bus speed that makes the difference over AGP.
twice as fast
AGP 8X or PCI 16X

ya really notice the difference
I have a setup that uses the X800 AGP and it works fine but after that was out the drivers AGAIN went downhill so switched to GeForce PCI X16 and at the time the GeForce card was rated alongside of the 800 and it was like night and day difference.

[danielkaiser]

I have an older motherboard with an AGP 8X slot. It seems all of the NVIDIA chipsets that are mentioned above are PCI-Express cards. Wouldn't an ATI Radeon HD3850 512mb 256-bit GDDR3 AGP 8X card (or something along those lines) be just as good? At least ATI has fairly new cards still available for use with AGP slots..

Historically when it comes to Lightwave ATI cards have been more trouble than its worth.

[manholoz]

I upgraded almost two weeks ago from an nVidia 8400 GTS to an ATI HD4850. Boy, the difference is just amazing. No problems (yet) with Lightwave and this video card.

[Litebright]

Was going to get the Sapphire Radeon HD3850 512mb 256-bit GDDR3 AGP 8X card, until I found out my 4.5 year old PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 510 Deluxe ATX power supply (which is STILL under warranty) doesn't have the required 2x4 power connector to support it..nor does it have a 2x3 connector for PCI express cards.

Next stop was an HD 2600XT or 2600Pro card. Found too many bad reviews about flakey drivers for the AGP versions of this card..:(

Best overall "old school" AGP card that will work with my PS and is still available to buy new seems to be the EVGA GeForce 7600GT 512mb DDR2 AGP8X card. Everyone says the stock fan/heat sink sucks, and to replace it with a Zalman VF700-CU 2 unit.

My current card is a 5.5 year old Radeon 9000 Pro 128mb DDR AGP4X....Amazing I have used this card for that long! The 7600GT should be a big improvement.:thumbsup: It is a good Lightwave card, right guys?

I'll get something faster when the time comes to upgrade my mobo, cpu & power supply.

[shrox]

How does my box rate?

HP Pavilion
Intel core2 quad processor Q6600
3gig mem
NVidia GeForce 8400 GS
Vista home premium
HP 24 inch widescreen HDMI monitor

[Litebright]

You've got a better system than I do..

Tonight I saw this card:

HIS Hightech H165GTQT512GDDAN-R Radeon X1650GT 512MB 128-bit GDDR3 AGP 8X IceQ Turbo Video Card $129.99

So I am now torn between this and the:

EVGA 512-A8-N559 GeForce 7600GT 512MB 128-bit GDDR2 AGP 4X/8X Video Card $109.99 + a required Zalman VF700 GPU cooler for 26.99 = $136.98

I think GPU power is about equal on both cards but the X1650GT has DDR3 RAM vs DDR2 on the 7600GT. The HIS card needs a floppy drive power connector, where the EVGA card can use any available IDE power connector.

Maybe someone can help me decide?? :question: I think perhaps the 7600GT drivers may be less fussy to get working properly.. Anyway, any comments anyone??

[Litebright]

Was hoping to hear input from someone... I made the decision myself, just now. I ordered the 7600GT + Zalman VF700 CU GPU cooler. I think the X1650GT card would have been a little bit faster in performance (in games but perhaps not in Lightwave), but I read too many reviews of people spending a couple days or more screwing around with ATI drivers to get the X1650GT running correctly. In a case or two, the person had to reinstall their Win XP OS, which I CANNOT afford to be doing right now.

I ordered the card from Newegg and will not be able to return it, only exchange for same, so I hope this card works out! I needed a few other things from Newegg that I couldn't find elsewhere, so that is why I got the card there.

The die as they say, is CAST!

[colkai]

Tee hee, and here's me with a turboCache 6200 Geforce 256MB ram :p (PCIExpress)

[kyuzo]

Wow! a turboCache 6200 Geforce 256MB ram? I only got a FX5200...
Sadly I can't even use that 'cos it looks like my motherboard is fried, so I'll probably be replacing my whole system pretty soon.

[Litebright]

I got my 7600GT installed in my computer and haven't really noticed any performance improvement over my old Radeon 9000 Pro card.. Scrubbing the timeline etc., seems to be about the same as far as I can tell. It made quite a difference in games, but not in Lightwave.

I have experienced one negative thing that I did not have with the old Radeon card. Every now and then my 4 viewports will go blank, and then rapidly redraw.. It does this quite frequently while working in Modeler or Layout. I NEVER saw this happen with the Radeon card. It is strange and kind of annoying. It happens in another game modification program that I have, which has the ability to show a 3D rendered preview or game models. The 3D preview window in this program (which is DirectX 9.0c based) also blanks and redraws in the same manner intermitently.

The card seems ok, except for that blanking and redrawing quirk (which kinda sucks).

[danielkaiser]

I got my 7600GT installed in my computer and haven't really noticed any performance improvement over my old Radeon 9000 Pro card.. Scrubbing the timeline etc., seems to be about the same as far as I can tell. It made quite a difference in games, but not in Lightwave.

I have experienced one negative thing that I did not have with the old Radeon card. Every now and then my 4 viewports will go blank, and then rapidly redraw.. It does this quite frequently while working in Modeler or Layout. I NEVER saw this happen with the Radeon card. It is strange and kind of annoying. It happens in another game modification program that I have, which has the ability to show a 3D rendered preview or game models. The 3D preview window in this program (which is DirectX 9.0c based) also blanks and redraws in the same manner intermitently.

The card seems ok, except for that blanking and redrawing quirk (which kinda sucks).

Is it random? mine will do that when I'm using the pull down menus and when I release the menu they will redraw, do you have the MS IntelliPoint drivers installed? they have also caused random redraw problems with Lightwave and other OGL aps, it was having this issue with Combustion.

[Litebright]

Is it random? mine will do that when I'm using the pull down menus and when I release the menu they will redraw, do you have the MS IntelliPoint drivers installed? they have also caused random redraw problems with Lightwave and other OGL aps, it was having this issue with Combustion.

After further experimentation, I have concluded that it is not random. Like you said, it seems to be associated with the pull-down menus on the left side ot the screen and the two drop-down menus (in the upper left corner of each viewport window) that allow you to select the viewport type (top, left, right, perspective, etc.) and rendering type (selecting between wire frame, smooth shade, textured, etc.).

I get 1 redraw of all four viewports upon initially running either Modeler or Layout. After clicking on a pull-down on the left side of the screen then closing out whatever window appears, I then get between 2 to 4 redraws one after the other. Usually it is 2 or 3, a few times I will get 4. When I use the pull-downs in each viewport to change their render type or the viewport type I will get 1 redraw after clicking on the selection in the drop-down menu.

Yes as a matter of fact, I do have the MS IntelliPoint drivers installed. As I bought a new wireless mouse along with the 7600GT. I cannot remember if I had the new mouse connected and the MS IntelliPoint drivers installed the very first time I attempted to use Lightwave after installing the 7600GT. But I did experience the screen redraws the first time I used Lightwave after installing the 7600GT. I do know that I did not have the MS IntelliPoint drivers on my system when I was using the Radeon 9000 card.

[Litebright]

Screen redraw problem was caused by the MS Intellipoint driver. Disabling it fixed the problem, see this thread:
http://www.newtek.com/forums/showthread.php?p=745381#post745381

[avkills]

It's the pci bus speed that makes the difference over AGP.
twice as fast
AGP 8X or PCI 16X


Ummm this is wrong...

The AGP 8x markup refers that the AGP bus is 8 times faster than the standard PCI bus speed on the motherboard or strobed 8 times per clock.

The PCI Express 16X means that it is using 16 lanes of serial data. PCI Express cards can be single lane 1X, four lane 4X, and most GPUs are 16X = 16 lanes.

But PCI express is faster than AGP.

-mark

[ice_blade_za]

I had to drop in here and point out that with Nvidia cards, the first number (ie, 8xxx or 7xxx) is the generation version. This includes supporting more of the newer technologies (which are mainly used in games) and the second set of three numbers is the model "level"

This said a 7950 would most lightly run faster than a 8400. But with less features (which are mostly used for for games.)

It nearly killed me when we ordered two PC's for low lever video editing and the IT department asked me why I was putting these high end gaming (Nvidia 7600) display cards in the PCs. One long e-mail later they didn't argue with me (explained how the Quatro's cost 4 times more and how the 7600 wasn't near the top.)

One thing to keep in the back of your mind in the CUDA technology from Nvidia that will only work with the 8 series and higher.

[JonW]

I have an E5450 v8 using a GTX280 & E5335 v8 using a 8600 512mb.
If you are not pushing around a stack of polys, the 8600 works really well.

[arrow1234]

hey people, besides graphics card, memory and CPUs are also important, i just upgrade my cpu from 1.5 to 2.2, and the difference isnt too bad for me:P
before:
http://i34.tinypic.com/28aoxft.jpg
after
http://i37.tinypic.com/sljlgg.jpg

notice: i did not change my graphics card, the only component i changed are cpus and adding more ram.
The 2 different results are based on exact same LW scene which is posted somewhere in this forum a long time ago.
hope this help :P

[Clockmaster]

ice_blade_za said:
I had to drop in here and point out that with Nvidia cards, the first number (ie, 8xxx or 7xxx) is the generation version. This includes supporting more of the newer technologies (which are mainly used in games) and the second set of three numbers is the model "level"

This said a 7950 would most lightly run faster than a 8400. But with less features (which are mostly used for for games.)

Absolutely right. And the same is for Ati Cards. The second set of three numbers is way more important for Lightwave OpenGL performance.