Hey everyone, looked for a tech forum but didn't see it so I'm hoping someone here can give me a few answers.

I need a new video card to replace my ATI radeon 9800pro which is failing.  I never had a problem with my NVidia cards so I am leaning in this direction.

Here's what I need to know.  Gaming takes a big card to run some of the graphic intensive games but does Bryce, Vue6Infinite, PS, Poser and D/S need big fancy cards?  I've had someone tell me that any modest card like the GeForce 7600GT or 7900GS will do a great job.  Is this true.  Don't want to waste my money on the wrong card for rendering and scene creation.

Have 1 Gig Ram (gotta put another gig in)
Power supply is 305BB Dell
Intel Pentium 4 @ 3Mhz
AGP 

Depending on how well my computer keeps up, I will probably keep it anohter 2 years.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.  

--Married female

The only thing a graphics card really does is determine how many polys can be moved around on the screen, especially in OpenGL mode. Other than that it's memory and CPU which are the driving factors in how big a scene can be and rendering speed.

I have a GeForce 7950 overclocked and it runs nicely.

Thanks Aldaron!

I agree with Aldaron... unlike gaming... with Bryce CPU Speed & Memory is what you want to spend you're money on.

Gaming needs fancy cards because some game specific effects are actually generated by the video card, not the processor. I don't think Bryce even uses active X yet. You probably can't buy a board old enough to slow Bryce down. 

What really kills in Bryce is when you have whopper scenes and shift the camera or objects and it takes 30 seconds to come back. That's memory, not video. Another meg is your best fix.

The GForce boards should do fine for even open GL renders in poser. The only thing I don't know about is Vue.

I have a BFG 7800GS AGP(one of the top AGP cards) that works very fast for OpenGL, and never gave any problems in 3dcg apps(including Bryce 6). Im not sure of an AGP ATi card(maybe X800 XT or X850 XT?).

Though my personal preference for the underdog has traditionally pushed me in ATI's favour, I've lately really come round to appreciate NVidia cards. They're more regularly faster then ATI's but the biggest thing is that their drivers are just plain better! ATI drivers are notoriously underdeveloped in comparison to NVidia drivers. Also I've been using an NVidia QuadroFX at the studio and its just plain blazing along! And the new NVidia GeForce in our gaming pc at the studio is working absolute miracles also, not to mention their budget cards are fast and cheap and often stable enough to do some significant overclocking.

I do have one question thou, considering that you're running a pentium 4 system, does your motherboard have an AGP slot or also PCI-Express?
If you dont need gaming power i'd go with a low to mid-range affordable NVidia card, it'll last you a good few years if you're not an avid gamer, and the price/performance value is great :-)

On the topic of videocards.. anyone know anything about Nvidia Tesla cards? Does Bryce take advantage of them? It's a vid-card that can also be adressed as if its a CPU, and it supposedly packs 128 cores and 500Gigaflops of calculating power for just $1500? I'm highly interested but i cant find anywhere if its CPU-like behaviour requires specific programming or if it really just looks like cpu to your software and will work automatically...

Ever seen in warcraft how distant mountains fade away or plants appear as you walk twards them? This fogging effect is due to a type of PNG compression called DDS. DDS is part of activeX and the texture files contain what are called MIP levels. What you have is a texture  with about 5 layers of detail and fogging. When the camera is a certain distance away a less detailed texture is used with a percent of a solid color to represent distance haze. Typically a texture will have 5 layers with the last one being 100% fogged. The video card calculates which mip texture to used based on the object's distance from the camera. Objects at a greater distance use less detailed textures that require less processing time to render. At the last mip level distance the card decides not to render the object at all. 

Textures are built specifically to the game and the MIP color can be anything. Warcraft uses a sunlight yellow gold color. URU used a purple color for the giant tree world called Kadish Tolesa. Making these textures takes a good deal of time.

DDS is already obsolete and has been replaced by GPU. Bryce never could use this technology because it is not designed as a motion game engine. You would waste more time creating custom MIP textures fro Bryce than you would save by using them. Other things like particle systems, fire, water. smoke are also processed by video cards in newer games. Bryce is not designed to call these functions so having the card will not speed up Bryce any.

Are you all talking about ActiveX or DirectX ?

Quote - DDS is already obsolete and has been replaced by GPU. Bryce never could use this technology because it is not designed as a motion game engine. You would waste more time creating custom MIP textures fro Bryce than you would save by using them. Other things like particle systems, fire, water. smoke are also processed by video cards in newer games. Bryce is not designed to call these functions so having the card will not speed up Bryce any.

I dont think any render engines use those graphics cards for final production renders except for NVidia's Gelato engine? Graphics cards are more important for the realtime previews and OpenGL or DirectX views in the programs interface in most 3d programs. Even bryce's OpenGL mode can benefit from a faster videocard, only thing about it is that bryce's default wire-view is most peoples favourite and rarely anyone seems to use the OpenGL view at all. But for final renders, hardly any renderengine uses videocards. at least for the moment. I do think this will change within the next few years though.