I understand that if I get a new graphics card that's got a nice big GPU on it then I understand that I'll get faster previews and but not faster rendering.

I'm currently getting black screens with OpenGL and my slower motherboard based graphics so I've turned off OpenGL and am using the Software option.

Will the new GPU make any improvements with this option turned on?

Also the Daz3d site says that all I need is a "**OpenGL compatible graphics card"
**
I'm curious to know which version of OpenGL that is? 1? 2? 3? Does it matter?

Yes, a new video card should make quite a difference with OpenGL turned on. I would recommend at least OpenGL 2.0 cards or higher. Your system should also see a slight improvement overall because of the new graphics card architecture, Im guessing.

You should definately see faster rendering as well - I always have when upgrading graphic cards :)

That black screen can be the antialising. turn it off on your card for Carrara. It is a known problem. Might not be yours but a few of us with good cards have to do that. So try that first before buying a new card.

But what is an good open gl card ?
using with Vista ?
 I see lots grafic card supporting  Direct  X  
and only big ones (Quatro Fx for example )supporting specifily openGl

I'm looking at an GEForce 8600 GT card which does support Open GL 2.0 and Direct X 10. Its reasonably expensive at £100 but the cheaper 8500s also support Open GL2 not everyone mentions OpenGL on their sites but you can normally track down if it is supported.

I found an interesting link here about Vista and OpenGL. Windows Vista and OpenGL-the Facts
http://www.opengl.org/pipeline/article/vol003_9/

Open GL is mostly used for graphics and CAD applications such as Carrara, DirectX is biased towards games but also used for some of the game development toolkits and other utilities e.g, http://developer.nvidia.com/object/fx_composer_home.html

I use a nvida 7600 gt 256 mg dd3 and works superb, as took out other pc as nvida cards can slow games down, unless you turn cards options to basic.
Nvida superb for rendering but  stick with ati for my gaming as i find games run better with ati.

Thanks AndyCleon
The link you put on is very interesting

I've popped my new hardware in place and re-run the Kixum benchmark, it came in almost exactly the same as Kixum suggested it would. So I'd expect this to be the same with most rendering.

Everything else has speeded up though so it's not a complete waste of money.

I got a nvidia geforce 6600 videocard 256mb and my carrara works fine and smooth for me.

i got 1gb ram DDR1 dual channel and everything works fin
But when i go to render a picture or a movie, it does it slow, i mean like 1 day for a video of 25 sec. Pictures renders fine. but the videos renders slow.
what can be the problem then???????

As mentioned above it's your CPU that's doing the hard work for rendering.

Appart from a low specification CPU, slow rendering could be one of many things:

My favourite switches to slow down rendering are:

Caustics: A 2s/frame render of a transparent flashing light for an ambulance slowed down to 2 minutes
Raytraced Depth of fields: 1s/frame changed to 3minutes.

The codec you export to may also cause problems. I normally render to uncompress AVI then use a conversion tool to change it to WMV.

Finally if your whole image can't fit in ram then the disk will start swapping and this could result in a 20-30 times slow down. Check task manager's performance tab, Commit Charge Total vs Physical Memory Total (or the equivalent if you are on a Mac)

Quote - I got a nvidia geforce 6600 videocard 256mb and my carrara works fine and smooth for me.

Your video card is not used during rendering so it doesn't matter what card you have.

Quote - i got 1gb ram DDR1 dual channel and everything works fin

How fast is your CPU because this is what's doing the rendering.

Quote - But when i go to render a picture or a movie, it does it slow, i mean like 1 day for a video of 25 sec. Pictures renders fine. but the videos renders slow. what can be the problem then???????

If by 1 day you really mean 24 hrs, then you are rendering about 1 second of video per hour. If your video is set to 30 frames per second you are rendering at a speed of 2 minutes per frame. That's not too bad depending on how complex the image is.

There are only two ways to speed up rendering. 1) Reduce Complexity. 2) Faster/More CPU

~jr

Quote - > Quote - I got a nvidia geforce 6600 videocard 256mb and my carrara works fine and smooth for me.

Your video card is not used during rendering so it doesn't matter what card you have.

Quote - i got 1gb ram DDR1 dual channel and everything works fin

How fast is your CPU because this is what's doing the rendering.

Quote - But when i go to render a picture or a movie, it does it slow, i mean like 1 day for a video of 25 sec. Pictures renders fine. but the videos renders slow. what can be the problem then???????

If by 1 day you really mean 24 hrs, then you are rendering about 1 second of video per hour. If your video is set to 30 frames per second you are rendering at a speed of 2 minutes per frame. That's not too bad depending on how complex the image is.

There are only two ways to speed up rendering. 1) Reduce Complexity. 2) Faster/More CPU

~jr

You mean by upgrade to a big CPU? and what about ram? Isn't the ram doing something with the rendering, speed it up? if  I upgrade my ram,does it go faster?

The ram and disk speed don't seem to make any difference the one exception would be if you had a really large scene and it could not all fit in memory.