I run Carrara, the other MetaCreations software, and the Corel graphics progs. For 3d modeling, I wa swondering what the best card is? Can I use one of the new gamer powerhouses? (G Force 2) or do i have to by some "pro" card (Oxygen?, etc) I am kind of new at 3d modeling, but have a halfway decent computer, P3-800mhz with 256 pc-133 ram and 40 gigs of hd space. Is this enough or should i consider something else/more? Thanks, Zhukov

Zhukov, Your system CPU and memory is in fine shape to handle most if not all 3D apps. I am looking at the new G Force 2 cards as well. They look very powerful. I know a few of the guys here run the Oxygen cards like BigSerge. I hear they are great. Im leaning towards the new G Force 2 cards. Right now I have a PII 400Mhz with 256 mb ram and a TNT1 AGP 16mb card. I;ve had this setup for almost 2 years and it is still working great. But, I feel that the upgrade to CPU and video cards are just around the corner for me. You might want to stop by : Toms Hardware To see if he has some info/benchmarks on these cards. His site is awsome. Maybe some of the other members are using the G-Force 2 or Oxygen cards and will post how they are doing for them. Regards and good luck. Clint Carrara, Ray Dream, Poser Figures and 3D Add-Ons. Hawkin-Z GraF-X

I currently have a p3 500 with 256 megs of ram and a GeForce 1 DDR, and I have never had a render take more than 15 minutes in Carrara.

cool, thanks guys. I am doing an animantion that is going to take 28 hours! 640x480, 24 FPS 24 ray depth. hehe I needed a day off after that modeling anyway. Looking for a new graphics card, Zhukov

Actually, with the Geforce 2, it is a fast card however, there are broken polygons, poor anti-aliasing and texture errors when running professional 3D apps. These events do not occur with the Oxygen line of boards so that is something to consider. Of course Carrara was not one of the apps that was tested for this problem also, If you are not a HELL-BENT HARDCORE 3D artist, these problems would not even bother you and may not even notice. I for one have to look at my screen for up to 18 hours a day and errors like that stand out. Geforce 2 is a good all around card for games and 3D. I personally would not buy one as I am not a gamer. I am more in tuned with cards like the Oxygen GVXII or Intense 3D wildcat. That is because they were made to run with heavy 3D apps like Lightwave, Maya etc....

One more note about rendering. Your Video card does not dictate how fast you comp is going to render. You Vid card deals with the real-time active openGL/DirectDraw such as rotating your mesh etc... All of your rendering to AVI is done on the processor. (Please correct me if I am wrong!) But when I do my final render is lightwave, I use the screamer net on 3 machines in my workshop and I won't even see the scene until I am done. That is of course optional but it is faster. I have 2 400's and a dual 700 all rendering the same AVI. It is all processor once the rendering takes place so you can have the greatest video card in the world and it will not speed up your production rendering a bit.

I really don't know much about hardware . I was wondering how much the speed of the final rendering was influenced by the whole system speed . I mean, is it really important to have a fast processor, fast ram, fast drive access, a fast motherboard ...? Thanks . litst

Most of your production rendering is handled by 4 main things. OS, Processor, Chipset and RAM. If you look at professional graphics workstations you will find that most of them run SGI, MAC, or Intel processors. That does not mean that other processors like AMD are not good processors, it just means that they don't have the industry support that the others have. I cannot think of any professional studio who runs the 95/98 series of OS's Most run Unix, Irix, Linux or NT. Reason being are threads and much better memory management than 95/98. And let us not forget stability and the option of TRUELY running real-time and tweaking the OS to one specific function. To drive graphics as hard as they can. Furthermore networking is also paramount. Like I stated before I run the Screamernet on my 3 machines. SN came with lightwave and it allows mean to use the processing power of as many machines that I want in order to more quickly render. This cannot be done in 95/98 so far as SN is concerned. Believe me, I tried. You have to NT for the particular version that I carry. Chipset/motherboard is very important. It is your chipset that can make you or break you. AMD athlon dual processors have many problems with chipset so they crash more often than not. Intel, SGI etc... have very stable dual processor systems and based on the OS and how you tweak it, you can get up to a 98% performance increase. I have never heard anyone getting beyond that however. Ram is very important because the faster your ram, the faster you past data. RD rams is very expensive but very fast and is used in many high end workstations. AMD processors cannot run with RD ram. At lease that is what I read. Also do any of you know what a render boxx is. For those of you who don't know, it is nothing more than a box full of processors. 30 or more. You will find render boxx hardware and many studios for production rendering. Voxels, Raytracing, Anti-aliasing are all very taxing and can make a simple render of 2 minutes frame last up to 1 hour plus per frame. I am not talking about Bryce or Carrara anti-aliasing I mean, 3rd part anti-aliasing and rendering engines that plug-in to existing software. So processors and ram are VERY important in production rendering because during production rendering, you won't even have a video output so what good is a video card at that stage! Vid cards are great in preproduction work but once you get into production rendering, it is all processing!

Essentially what it boils down to is this. Carrara does take advantage of OpenGL or Direct 3d hardware for rendering. Your 3d card is important, but you will mostly see the difference in preproduction. Despite what use Carrara may make of your video card, it still mostly uses the CPU for rendering. With a P3 800 and 256 megs of ram you're going to get some pretty good performance. Your system is going to be able to nicely handle what Carrara and the Corel software ask of it just nicely. Unless you're doing large professional quality animations you should be ok. Also, Tephladon, where are you getting your information about dual Athlons? Last I checked, which was just now, there haven't been any dual Athlon motherboards released. Dual Athlon has been a promise that AMD has been making that they have yet to keep as far as I know.

There are no dual Althon mobo's that I am aware of, however AMD and VIA are releaseing chipsets for duals in the next month or so. The reason Win 98/95 is not used is because it doesn't support SMP, and if you are running a high end proggy you need the extra CPU power. The main use of the vieo card is for real time viewing, some programs offload certain functions to the GPU, but the CPU does most of the heavy lifting. RDRAM is an expensive joke, very small performance gain for a huge price premium, you can expect a 7% speed increase with about a 25% price increase in system cost. And that 7% is under the best conditions.

Yeah you can run about anything on an 800mhz P3. Actually I got my info from CGW. Several companies are testing the dual Athlon there are some real chipset issues there. I really don't know the in's and out of industry, that is just what I read so go easy on the messenger. RDRAM a joke. HEHEHEHEH that is funny. Do you know how much I hear that from people whom are not in the professional market. Well here was the lowdown that I was given about RDRAM. A nascar driver will make extreme changes to his car and engine just to shave 1/2 off his lap time. That 1/2 second will make little difference with only one lap but with 200, that is where the payoff lies. The same goes for RDRAM. A 16 to 20 production render will make little difference but when you are getting into a week or more of rendering, oh yes, then the RDRAM is starting to payoff because that overall 3-7% is steadily increasing with the more time it takes to render. So you are picking up a modest 5% per hour. Well over 200 hours has gone by and multiply that 5% by the amount of hours you have spent rendering. Big difference huh! It amazes me how most people fail to see that.

i just buy mac so mac does me well Dual G4 500MH/Z 256

Ok here we go, that 7% inrease was a i840 (dual channel RDRAM) vs. a BX 440 w/PC100 SDRAM. Here's what happens if you clock the FSB of the BX to 133. Higher is better Sysmark 2000 440BX 133 MHz FSB PC133 SDRAM 173 i840 PC800 RDRAM 171 Bryce 4 440BX 133 MHz FSB PC133 SDRAM 201 i840 PC800 RDRAM 187 Corel Draw 9 440BX 133 MHz FSB PC133 SDRAM 181 i840 PC800 RDRAM 182 Elastic Reality 440BX 133 MHz FSB PC133 SDRAM 197 i840 PC800 RDRAM 204 Excel 2000 440BX 133 MHz FSB PC133 SDRAM 171 i840 PC800 RDRAM 183 NaturallySpeaking Prof 4.0 440BX 133 MHz FSB PC133 SDRAM 201 i840 PC800 RDRAM 187 Paradox 9.0 440BX 133 MHz FSB PC133 SDRAM 173 i840 PC800 RDRAM 163 Photoshop 5.5 440BX 133 MHz FSB PC133 SDRAM 147 i840 PC800 RDRAM 142 PowerPoint 2000 440BX 133 MHz FSB PC133 SDRAM 176 i840 PC800 RDRAM 179 Premiere 5.1 440BX 133 MHz FSB PC133 SDRAM 168 i840 PC800 RDRAM 168 Windows Media Encoder 4.0 440BX 133 MHz FSB PC133 SDRAM 171 i840 PC800 RDRAM 171 Word 2000 440BX 133 MHz FSB PC133 SDRAM 148 i840 PC800 RDRAM 151 Open GL Tests AWadvs 440BX 133 MHz FSB PC133 SDRAM 77.7 fps i840 PC800 RDRAM 77.7 fps DRV-06 440BX 133 MHz FSB PC133 SDRAM 31.74 i840 PC800 RDRAM 31.43 There are some other test that favor the i840 but they are AGP4 vs. AGP2. RDRAM's only real speed advantage is in high-bandwidth video editing and unless you do your graphics in MS Office, don't expect any gains in performance. The price of RDRAM 256mb ECC chips fell $200 this past week if anyone is intrested. My point is that money spent on RDRAM is better spent on getting another machine to spread the workload around.