Hi everybody, here's a technical question: being a passionate Mac-user, now for technical matters I have to buy a Win XP machine. If I want to use both Carrara 3 and Amapi Pro, what graphic cards should I consider? I know that one of the system requirements for both programs is Open GL support, but for some reason none of the pc-dealers around here can tell me whether the graphic cards (ATI Radeon, NVidia & Co.) do actually support it or not. Can anybody advise me on this one, please? Your help would be appreciated. Thanks a lot, J

I'd go Nvidia, they tend to have good support of OpenGL no matter what card you get. Really a lot depends upon your price range? Brian

I agree with Nvidia. C3 has a good software renderer that can be used instead of OpenGL. Amapi will be the only real issue. I would go to the Amapi forum and ask for a review of the software on the specific PC in question. I don't know about the new versions but the older versions had a lot of display problems.

Historically Nvidia cards have much better OpenGL drivers, but I recently replaced my ti 4200 with an ATI 9800 Pro. One thing that the ATI does the Nvidia never did was antialias inside Carrara. It seems like such a little thing, but really makes a big difference when modeling small details and working with the tree modeler (because of the thin branches).

I think you'll be happy with Carrara performance using any recent Nvidia or ATI card. Avoid anything that mentions Intel Extreme or any unidentified cards.

Regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
3D plug-ins for Carrara
http://digitalcarversguild.com

Message edited on: 09/24/2004 05:23

Thank you all for your kind assistance! J