I am considering a major upgrade of my computer. Including the video card. I've seen several messages in the archives here, but none really answers my questioning.
I wish to buy a PCI express video card, which would be optimized for Open GL. Most cards i've looked at, whether Radeon or Nvidia GeForce enabled, claim an OpenGL 1.5 compatibility, but also DirectX9. I didn't see any which looks really made for OpenGL applications.
Any recommendations ? Hints about which GPU, which specific card ?
And a "subquestion" : is SLI format really interesting for graphics uses (Poser, Vue...) ?

Thanks in advance

Message edited on: 09/01/2005 12:28

The world's most popular answer applies here: it depends. If you are strictly looking to improve Poser, then don't even bother with a high end card. Just get one that supports OpenGL, and use the excess cash on RAM, Hard Disk space, & CPU. Those are going to make the biggest difference for you. The OpenGL only functions in the Preview window, so going for great OpenGL performance for this is almost worthless. I don't know much about SLI, so I cannot speak much about it, but I can say it won't speed up Poser. As for other apps, that is a question for someone else. Again, it depends. If you are looking to play Unreal, Half Life, and Quake on your computer, then go for a higher end video card. Otherwise, you will probably spend better money on memory, storage, and processing power.

I already plan on spending money on a processor and memory :) What i can't figure out is which cards are supporting OpenGL at least correctly. Since Windows XP Pro has a poor OpenGL feature, and that most cards pretend to have OpenGL, i'm a bit lost. I currently have a Nvidia Geforce4 Ti 4200, and i'm not exactly satisfied of its OpenGL abilities. Poser is so-so, and any Vue render makes my computer unable of any decent multitask, even with a Pentium 4 3,2gb and 1gb RAM. I'm planning on purchasing a Pentium 4 D 840 and 4 gb DDRII PC 5400 to improve all my graphics applications performances. I would just like not to have this money wasted because a video card wouldn't comply well with these standards.

Well any nVidia card from the past year (actually past couple of years, but who wants a 2 year old card?) has good OpenGL support. Practically any of them on the market right now should be fine. I don't suggest ATI, since their OpenGL support has been a bit shaky. I have a PIII 1Ghz, 1GB RAM, with an eVGA geForce (6400? Something in that area, I am not home now so I can't look.) My system has no problems with Poser. Any card you can buy right now should be good enough.

Actually, ATI upgradd their opengl support to opengl 2.0 almost 3 months ago. I just bought a new athlon system, with a ATI Radeon x700 pci express card, because I needed opengl 2.0 for Lightwave 8.5 and 9.0 on the horizon, and becuase IO also wanted drivers for windowsxp 64 bit, and the radeon drivers have been reported very favorably in a few places, and were what Newtek was using to demo Lightwave 8.5 and 9.0 64 bit. I've owned both Nvidia and ATI over the years (hell, and Voodoo 3 as well.), and both are good solid performers. You may want to consider a ATI Radeon all in wonder card, with built in tv tuner and HDTV ability for the future. I currently own 2 ati 8500 all in wonders, 2 radeon ati 9600 all in wonders, and one ati radeon x700 pro card, and all perform excellently. In UT 2004 with all the eyecandy on, I can run 1600x1200 4x antialiasing, and get over 85 fps. Now if only games would support the 64 bit archetecture... I would HIGHLY recommend looking at the 64 bit processors though, if you are looking at spending cash upgrading. Performance almost doubles when you use windowsxp 64, and once those drivers marute a little more, it'll be the os of choice on PC rigs using graphic utilities. If I wanted to spend the cash, a 64 bit dual core would REALLY be the way to go, but I'll be happy with the speed increases i currenty added, and will upgrade to a dual core processor after christmas, once the prices drop some.

If you're using the latest Intel dual-core CPU's, socket 940, don't bother buying any non-Intel PCIe video boards, such as nVidia. Stress-test prove it's flakey. AMD has no such problem. Personally I would avoid WinXP 64 for a year. The short story: expect to use twice the RAM to run the same applications, with no improvement in performance. Currently there's very little support for older hardware. The long story: 99.9% of current application run in Win64 XP under emulation, WOW64. To keep the performance reasonably close to the current levels, all 32 bit data is written at 64 bit boundaries, half the RAM is wasted. Next, hardware manufacturers have been mostly unresponsive in updating OLD drivers, such as older printers, scanners, video cards, ... I think the reason for this is most manufacturers except you to but all new equipment when you purchase your new PC, so there's very little incentive.

You're looking in the wrong place. None of the popular cards are really OpenGl cards. They can do openGL and some of them quite well, but they're not optimized for it. If you want robust power for 3D applications, either OpenGL or DirectX then look at: Nvidia Quattro series http://www.nvidia.com/page/workstation.html or ATI FireGL series http://www.ati.com/products/firegl.html These are not you're ordinary home user card but the real certified OpenGL cards. These guys are expensive, but do pack a lot of power when it comes to 3D computing. "If you are strictly looking to improve Poser, then don't even bother with a high end card. Just get one that supports OpenGL" Very innacurate statement. I agree that Poser itself may not be worth an expensive OpenGL, although I doubt most of the people using Poser have seen a real OpenGL card in action. If I could afford one, I would get one, even Poser with OpenGL enables does benifit a lot with a high end pro card. Don't just get any card that supports OpenGL, unless you want trouble. OpenGL is very demanding and a lot of the older cards recommended will not handle larger Poser scenes at all when it comes to OpenGL. I know most people around here never get beyond 1 or 2 figures, but if you do some serious large scenes as I do the older cards will not be sufficient. Try OpenGL in Poser with 10 figures, a number of props, hair and clothes and so on and you're older OpenGL card will soon be a huge annoyance. I've got a Radeon 9600 Pro 256Mb, still quite good (even when it comes to gaming) in spite of it's age, but with larger scenes age does start to show very quickly.

I have an ATI X600 pro card and OpenGL in poser6 works just fine although I would prefer an Nvidia 6600 card. thefixer, poser coord.

"You're looking in the wrong place. None of the popular cards are really OpenGl cards. They can do openGL and some of them quite well, but they're not optimized for it." Actually, the current consumer cards do opengl quite well, but what I think Aeikema intended to present, that professional opengl cards are MUCH faster then the consumer cards, but also carry a hell of a pricetag. (read $400-$800) compared with a good consumer card costing $200 or so. Much depends on your use, but for high end consumers, I think the ati x700 pro is fine, and does the job here quite well. (But bear in mind, its also running in a fast athlon system, optimised for processing speed, with fast hard drives and memory) And I've found current 64 bit drivers for my monitor, scanner, video and audio cards without issue. Oddball stuff like my 4 year old tablet I'm sure I'll not find. As far as printer and scanners, I just networked my new system to the old, and it's become the "background" system now, running outlook express, explorer for forums and browsing, and my printer n such run fine with it networked in. Very easy to setup, and having that second system there mens I can also network it for rendering in Bryce, and Lightwave as well. Almost everyone in the 3d community is VERY excited about 64 bit tech, and want to adopt it asap, because of the speed increases. I wouldn't say wait a year, but I'll be hard pressed to not adopt it as a "Christmas present" to myself. But new hardware and tech adopters always have proponant and opponants, and you really need to read up some, and make educated decisions based on your situation, applications, and uses yourself.

Well if you wait a year Win Vista will be here (or so they say, but you know MS...... :) ). I imagine this is probably why you might find that vendors are not updating their drivers just yet. On the hardware side 64 bit is a bit of problem. I do Microchip programming at Uni and 64 bit is cool, a long as you can kep it cool! The 64 bit bus has a heat dissipation that is extremely close to the limits of an extractor fan. Though I think these problems have been mostly fixed.

I've read that Win Vista would be a real hell with OpenGL though... Thanks to all for these advices, i have a lot to think about now, but with solid elements to consider my purchase :)

I'm a bit disappointed with my nVidia 6800LE. It SHOULD completely blow my old Ti4200 out of the water, but it doesn't. At least, not with OpenGL. The DirectX performance is just fine. I've had a lot of compatibility problemw with OpenGL on a Radeon9600 Pro. OpenGL performannce in Poser isn't too much of an issue, but in Vue you want stable and fast OpenGL. Summary of my graphics cards on OpenGL performance: Ti4200: fastest, stable Geforce6800LE: slowest, stable Radeon 9600 Pro: medium fast, unstable. By the way, DirectX is a completely different story. All three cards run stable, and the 6800LE is significantly faster than the Radeon9600, which in its turn is significantly faster than the Ti4200. And before someone asks - the drivers are all up to date.

Most cards i've looked at, whether Radeon or Nvidia GeForce enabled,
claim an OpenGL 1.5 compatibility

Among all the other "that depends"es, that depends on your driver. I have an NVidia GeForce FX5500, which I got six months ago so I can use DAZ|Studio, and when I installed the (then) current NVidia driver v71.84, I got OGL 1.5.1 support. There's a new driver set out, though, v77.72 for Win9x and v77.77 for Win2000/XP. Instant upgrade to OGL 2.0 and DAZ|Studio is visibly better-looking in its OGL functions.

Yes, I know the 5500 is a bit long in the tooth, but it's cheap, doesn't need a PSU extension plugin, easy to install, and does everything I need. Using the drivers from the NVidia website makes all the difference. I'll be upgrading my system in a few weeks, but that 5500 card stays.

I really have got bad experiences with Nvidia drivers updates... I had ben caught once in the "infinite loop" error because of such drivers, so now i do really prefer having a good video card with an accurate driver when i buy it, which avoids me some potentially dangerous upgrades. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" (old computer saying) ;)

Don't ever update your drivers if you don't need too. My system is working great and I haven't updated a driver in over a year. I'm even still on WinXP SR1, allthough that's not a driver, but it's working great as is.

Hello, I had asked this problem to e-frontier self. They said, it is also important, that the single components of the computer are working good together. So on some older Laptops Poser runs faster as on some newer selfcomposed desktops! I myself have a 6600 GT (128 MB) and 1 GB with a 2,8GHz. Poser 4.03 Preview runs fast enough, even with three V3 and some props and sky and landscape. If I turn the scene in smooth-rendering-view it tooks 5 seconds to calculte the scene. A little bit faster it can go with another view, maybe in cartoon o.e. Which view do you prefer for your work? But yesterday I got Poser 6 and tested OpenGL. It is very slow. Today I will testing the Sreed Preview. E-Frontier give me for Poser 4 the tip to download an SP1. This allows Poser 4 to use all the RAM-Memory full! The next possibility is (but I didn't try it until now) to load a graphikcard tunetool like : Rivatuner www.guru3d.com/rivatuner for better openGL-Performance. Then I heard that the graphicards from gainward could be run with higher clocking, because the default setting is a higher clocking as standard. I will test this with 10-15% higher clock. I think Poser runs fastest in Sreed (Software-Render-Mode, which is also used for dynamic-processes in Poser 6 - as e-frontier siad), but you need 2GB-RAM. If I use Sreed I give Poser 1GB to work, but if I use the graphik card I have 128 MB or 256 MB. Why should this be faster? Sometimes Windows could not allocate the big 256 MB in some games well, so they are slower with a 256 GB-Card than with 128 GB! For the Runtime-Library-Speed a good throughput in the harddrive is recommanded, like S-ATA II will bring. But my Samsung 160 BG (IDE) is big enough and for my runtime with 2GB-Size fast enough, too. Regards, Roger

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12377&Form.ShowMessage=2410597

I just used RivaTuner on my 6800LE this weekend. Awesome results. A Poser 6 scene containing 6 Millenium 3 figures with transmapped hair plus some props rotated realtime in textured preview mode, transparencies and all. My system now believes that 6800LE is a Quadro 4000, and behaves accordingly - including using the better Quadro drivers. Here's a link how to do it. A similar tool exists for ATI Radeon cards - those can be tweaked into FireGL cards.