Can anyone give me advice on what graphics card to buy I have about 120, I currently have a gforce mmx 440 which now has the occasional heart attack when I'm using Poser, Bryce or Photoshop..I really do need to upgrade...any advice would be greatly appreciated. blessings in advance d

The hottest one from Nvidia you can afford. Actually, though, I'm using a GeForce FX 5200 with 128 MB of memeory and it works great. But you can probably get something a lot better by now.

Well, my advice is to stick with nVidia if you want it work good with Poser. ATI makes a better gaming card, but for the OpenGL support, you probably want to stick with nVidia. I have an e-GeForce 5200 from eVGA. Supposedly, it is one of the worst cores nVidia ever released, and yet, I get great playback on my games, and Poser runs great. I have never needed the Sree software in Poser, so I cannot complain. If you go with nVidia, I would say anything above the 5200 series is going to be good for you. Considering you are playing with a decent amount of money, you can get a very nice card. I just scanned over some offerings at NewEgg.com, and there are a few 6600 series cards with 128MB on board in your price range. With a little bit of legwork, I am sure you could take a step or two down in the numbers, and find one with more RAM. That should work wonders for your Poser work. Hope that helps.

LOL, Fazzel, so I am not the only one left with "the crappiest nVidia card ever?"

It was $70 at CompUSA, so I can't complain. Like I say, it works great and Nvidia is great at supply driver updates.

I can't complain either. I got mine cheap, and it has worked fine for me, with the exception that I needed some tweaks to play a game once. The "crappiest" comment was what I saw when I was running into the issue with the game, and I was trying to figure it out, but once I did, I haven't had a hiccup since.

thanks destro & fazzel..much appreciated indeed...i shal commence my hunt...lol

Get the new Nvidia 6 series if you can, the 6600 is an ideal card for Poser6. My new PC has an ATI X600 card in but I'll be changing to the nvidia just as soon as I can. thefixer, poser coord.

I recently bought a new card online an XFX GeForce FX5900 XT it was a very good price, I know of an excellent site that has really great prices (yup its UK).. Not sure if I should post the URL here or not... you can always PM me if you want the addy. I phoned the company, they were really helpful and the card turned up a day after I ordered it...

My new card was 106 - it retails at most other places for 180+

-S-
xXx

Message edited on: 06/25/2005 10:52

are you sure its the vid card? an mx440 is pretty low end, but it shouldnt have any issues running poser's simple opengl workspace. what are your other system specs? reason i ask is that were on the verge of the next generation of video cards... now is not a good time to buy. if you can hold out for a couple of months youll get a much better deal.

A gfx card that chokes on Poser? Almost impossible, Poser hardly demands anything from your gfx card. Neither does Bryce really or Photoshop..... They all were created with people who don't own expensive gfx cards in mind, they hardly put a strain on the gfx card.

" A gfx card that chokes on Poser? Almost impossible, Poser hardly demands anything from your gfx card." That's only if you're running it in SreeD display, or earlier versions of Poser before P6. While it's true Poser itself isn't demanding on your card, if you're running P6 in OGL (hardware) mode, you can have LOTS of problems with it crashing or acting up with older cards or outdated drivers. You seemed to agree with this in your post on this thread... http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2306738 You're right about Photoshop though, but Bryce (latest DAZ upgrade anyway) makes use of OpenGL, so your gfx card would make a difference in onscreen redraw performance there too.

But I do doubt he's using OpenGL at all. Since he's got the problems too with PhotoShop. Besides that he's only using a MX440, again I doubt he'll be even running OpenGL with that one.

"But I do doubt he's using OpenGL at all. Since he's got the problems too with PhotoShop."

Dayjo hasn't stated the amount of RAM on the card, but if you try to work on a big PS image with a 32 MB graphic card...you know the drill ;-)

I'm pretty sure that the MX440 never had more than 64 MB RAM, and only the (very) later models.

P6 has an openGL workspace (finally, geez), which does put some straiin on your GPU. honestly, i dont see much of a difference at all (you could just disable it in the settings). but, i'd have thought that a mx4400 would be enough to run it. i mean its basically a rebadged geforce2 GTS, and i used one of those to run 3ds max's openGL workspace for years with no problems (of course i may have modded the card into a quadro, dont remember). anyways, this is why im asking about the system specs. perhaps the slowdown is due to other reasons. for all we know the original poster could have 128 megs of RAM, or running it on win9x, etc.

mx 440, rather. how many megs, btw?

Hi guys thanks for the input, here's my specs.... AMD Athlon 2000+ 1.67ghz 1 gig of DDR RAM 266 Gforce MMX440 64MB

OS? if youre on 9x, upgrade to XP or 2000. poser always crashed for me on windows 98, its never crashed since i switched to 2000, and then later xp. if youre using poser 4-5, then the viid card has nothing to do with it. if you are using P6, then it might, if you have the OpenGL workspace enabled. i have no idea whhat the minimum specs are for it, although it works fine on my secondary rendering machine which just has a 128 meg geforce4 mx4000, which for all intents and purposes is the same card you have just a bit more RAM. theyre unveiling the next gen of video cards around now (not sure if they have yet, been too busy to check current events), so if you can stick it out for a couple of months you will get a much better card for your 120 pounds. im not saying buy the next gen ones - it never pays to buy cutting edge, in terms of bang for your buck. but the prices of the current lineup of cards will drop, so it may make the difference between you being able to get a valuee/mainstream card or something like a vanilla geforce 6800 which will last you awhile. then again thats always the argument with computers... if i wait a few months, ill get something much better, and if you dont watch it youll end up putting off your purchase forever, heh. so i guess you need to decide how badly you need that card now. if you can live with disabling the OpenGL workspace for a couple of months till around sept, youll get a better card. if you need it now, try to get a 6600 GT, if you shop around you may find some good deals (not certain what the exchange on the pound is, im assuming its still better than the US dollar). im sticking with my radeon 9700 pro for a little longer, ill get something this xmas when really good deals roll out. i think its rediculous how much theyre charging for vid cards now, i saw one the other day in the store for $1300 canadian, and it wasnt a pro workstation card either.

I'm running win xp and poser 5 sr4 if that's any help ???

I'm just wondering if it's my cpu as I always get delay in photoshop..but then again I use big files as I render at 1800x1800 300dpi....and save as TIFF. So they are about 4 or 5 meg files....hmmm...maybe cpu just can't handle it..but I thought the whole point of having a graphics card or part of the reason for having one is to take the processing power away from the CPU????

I think you are asking the right questions but it is hard to get a straight answer. I have been on the verge of replacing my old machine for three months now, tired of slow rendering time, but no other problems. The issue is that the video card and how much memory is just the beginning of the questions. Enjoying the dialog here. Since I buy a computer every five years and then do incremental upgrades, I want to buy a machine that can hang in there for a few years. So, would getting one with the potential of going to 16 Gigs of memory be the right choice? I never dreamed that 1 Gig would not be enough! How about the new 64 bit cpus from Intel and AMD not to mention the dual core choice. I know that fast hard drives in a raid configuration can help. So, just wishing some tech savy artist will chime and help with all the choices.

Well, here is my two cents 1DanK. From what I know right now, there is no reason to even think about 16GB of RAM. No current OS can support more than 3GB, and even that is not recommended for the non-techie. I know what you mean about the 1GB situation though. I remember back around 1998 saying that when 1Ghz CPUs were released that would be the last computer I would ever have to buy, well, 20/20 hindsight says I was way off the mark! The 64 bit CPUs are a novelty to me. I don't see any use for the average user for at least 2 or 3 years. They are being super-hyped by Intel, simply because AMD beat them to the punch. Server software will be built for the 64bit generation in the near future, but for your desktop, don't count on it. By dual-core, I assume you mean the whole hyperthreading thing? I haven't had the opportunity to test that, but I have heard that some people are getting a noticable boost in performance for graphic intensive apps, especially games. IMHO, it's another hype machine. All hyperthreading does is use more of the CPU's clock cycles to process data. I have always wanted to test to see if 2 CPUs on a board would be significantly faster, even with both at a slower speed, than the same speed CPU with hyperthreading enabled. My theory would be that the two pipelines could process data faster than the single. Fast hard drives are going to help a lot with Poser. It seems Poser loves to abuse the virtual memory of a system. Being able to write back and forth to a drive faster is of course going to help that process. However, not sure why RAID configs would be necessary. RAID is more a technology for servers, since its main purpose is to have the same data in 2 places simultaneously. My suggestion is to get high speed IDE drives. I forget what the current acronym is at the moment, but I think it is SATA. Basically, if you can afford them, get the 10k RPM disks, with the largest cache size you can afford. (I think I saw a 120GB 10k 8MB cache drive in CompUSA's circular last week for around $120.) I hope some of this helps!

take a look at http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/home/index.html?_LOC=UK and click on graphics cards on the left, they have everything there and they are good. and cheep.

And i think i probably own the crappiest graphics card ever, The Tseng labs ET6000, built in 1993. But currently not in any machine as it is too crap...lol... mind you all of my first Pc is in bits due to years of upgrading...lol.. Only thing i threw away was my massive 210mb (yes that Megabytes) Hard drive, because it died, bless it, now it's buried in the garden. And thus things move on...

Thanks destro75, really helps. I think I got the impression from Microsoft that their new 64bit OS can address upto 16 GIGs and the Dell Workstation can be purchased with 16 GIGS...I can't afford that but it does leave room for the future heavy apps programers love to build. So I have been looking at this Dell Precision Workstation 670 with these specs: Fastest 64-bit Intel XeonTM processors available including new 3.0, 3.2, 3.4, 3.6GHz with 2MB L2 cache in addition to current 2.8, 3.0, and 3.2GHz processors with 1M L2 cache. Comprehensive operating support for Microsoft Windows XP Professional. Balanced 800 MHz front side bus with up to 16GB of high-speed Dual Channel DDR2 400MHz ECC SDRAM memory, Open GL certified workstation-class PCI Express graphics (NVIDIA Quadro FX 3400 (PCIe x16 card, 256MB)), and Serial ATA. There is also a similar one the Alienware makes but both are beyond my budget so I am trying to figure out what to cut out and what to keep. My head hurts because this should be easier and well, fun.

Well, maybe the new 64Bit OS can support that memory, but what apps are going to run on the system? I think I read that EF is not supporting 64Bit in the near future, so it won't run on the system. Those 64Bit systems are great, if you are running an enterprise level server, otherwise, the software isn't available to run for you. (But once everyone goes 64Bit, can you imagine the things we will be able to do!) I am dying to purchase my first Xeon though. I was lucky enough to be working for a computer manufacturer when the Xeons were being sent out for evaluation. We built a system with a quad Xeon setup, I was totally in love... That does look like a nice setup though. Dare I even ask the total price tag on that? That PCIe is what I believe Blackhearted was discussing earlier, about the next generation of cards. It's not even so much as a core CPU change, it's a total bus change. I haven't looked into it enough, but I am greatly disturbed by it. When the industry went to AGP, it was supposed to be so that the video had its own channel to run on, and the only time you had cross-bus traffic was if you went over your RAM on the card. Now, they have moved it back to a shared bus. Now supposedly the bus is much faster, but then, why not just improve bus speed on AGP? Perhaps the computer industry is tired of simple upgraders? By changing the bus, basically you need a new board and CPU to take advantage. If you go that route, chances are you need new RAM as well. If you go that far, you may as well buy new. Ho-hum, screw the consumer again... On the subject of video cards, has anyone had any experience with the new SLI technology? From what I gather, it allows you to piggyback video cards to have more video processing power. I am curious about that one, and to me, that would be a good reason to upgrade. It can be daunting to go through all of the options available these days, but it can be fun. Imagine the true fun it would be if you had an unlimited budget to build a dream machine!

The latest configuration I showed in the last message was close to 8 grand with the slowest speed cpu. It also included two 20 inch monitors which I will probably forgo so I can get the price down to 5. I figure that comes out to 1 grand a year if I can keep it going for 5 years which is usually what I do. I will probably pick-up the monitors locally. It does seem like the dual processors or dual-core cpus will be good initially for doing an area render and jumping out to your email or whatever. Each app would be running in its on processor. In time, we would hope the products we use would begin to use the new power in the OS, CPUs and video cards. There does seem to be a real difference though between the specifications and the precision of the video boards targeted for the gaming community those targeted at the workstation crowd. The later are more precise and have many unigue capabilites that only the premium products ever use. SLI seems to be targeted more toward the gaming world. I have been focusing on the workstation/precision card where getting the right pixel is more important than getting a close-enough pixel blazingly fast. This is because I understand that the majority of the render speed issues are with the CPU, memory and virtual memory.

i have an athlon64. yeah, the 64-bit feature set is - at the moment - still in the hype phase. but thats exactly what they said about MMX, SSE, etc when they were first released, and they made a huge difference. but 64-bit aside, in a purely 32 bit environment athlon64's are still very powerful systems. once those 64 bit features are utilized (with longhorn, more product support, etc) itll make a much larger difference and theyll leave everything else behind. as for the the memory issue.. you wont be using 16 gigs of memory for a long, long time, so dont let that influence a buying decision. even with athlon 64 boards, most users are using a gig of memory because of the single sided/dual sided issue with dual channel DDR, and how scarce single sided chips are. also, with the athlon64 you have an on-die memory controller so your memory is runnning at the same speed as your CPU as opposed to being limited by the FSB, so its a nice advantage. my main system right now is: athlon 64 3000 (1800mhz, overclocked to 2400) 1 gig corsair value RAM (with a64s its pretty pointless to get expensive RAM, although adding RAMsinks is always a good idea) radeon 9700 pro (overclocked a wee bit) SB Audigy 2 a pair of hitachi deskstar SATA drives i wont be upgrading for a long time. ironically my secondary 'rendering' machine is pretty much identical to your system. xp 2000+, gig of ram, 64mb geforce2 GTS, and i dont run into any problems with it. if you are using poser5, then the graphics card - unless its something incredibly slow like an old trident - has absolutely nothing to do with it. even the most pitiful of modern cards can keep up with just about any 2D graphical processing you throw at it, and 3D processing power only comes into play when you are running something like OpenGL, Direct3D, etc. Poser5 has a basic software driven workspace, not OpenGL hardware like P6 (although i really fail to see any huge difference between the two in terms of appearance, other than the gridlines). something else just came to mind: its high summer, so try checking up on your cooling. perhaps your vid card cooling fan died, or one of your case fans, etc.. could be causing some lockups there.

"That PCIe is what I believe Blackhearted was discussing earlier, about the next generation of cards. It's not even so much as a core CPU change, it's a total bus change." PCIe is pretty old news now, i was referring to ATI and nVidia unveiling their new lines of video cards. it was supposed to happen in June, ive just been too busy lately to keep up-to-date on hardware news. did a quick search... THIS is what i was referring to. give ATI a chance to follow suit with its own new offering, give them both a couple of months to hit store shelves, and prices should drop significantly on the geforce 6x00 series of cards. cheers, -gabriel

ehh, another afterthought: these days, graphics cards are like having another, powerful computer inside your computer. ive read that programmers are working on ways to harness that power when iits not in use for 3D processing: similar to math co-processors back in the day. should be interesting. the physics processors that are in development should also be interesting to see unfold. these days, physics calculations in games are pretty taxing, and not just in games like half-life 2 but in the most unexpected ones - like overhead view turn-based games such as silent storm. should be interesting to see all of this new techhnology put to use... then again, its getting kindof scary how expensive certain aspects of computers are becoming. while the mainstream computer market prices are plummeting (hell you can buy a complete machine for a few hundred bucks nowadays), the prices of anything geared towards the poweruser or gaming enthusiast are skyrocketing. i mean, $1400 for a video card that will be mediocre in less than 2 years? jesus.

Thought this might be of some interest, The latest issue of 3D World has a comp to win a Pure PCIx Render card, which has 16 AR350 raytracing processors. the downside is i think it works with things like 3ds Max and all those other bits of expensive software. and the cost 3000, now that has to be good for that money.

Attached Link: http://www.artvps.com/