So I'm pondering getting a new card. Two I have my sight on are EVGA's 8600GT with 1GB of DDR2 And the other being BFG's 8800GT with 512 of DDR3 memory.  Which would be better for usiung with Poser, having more memory, or having better memory?
The 8800 comes with a $40 rebate, so it works out to be only $36 more than the 8600.

The 8800 doesn't only come with faster memory, it comes with a faster GPU as well. Which makes the choice fairly easy.
If you reduce the maximum preview texture size, the lower amount of memory (though 512 MB is still quite a bit!) will not slow the system down. In almost every aspect that 8800 will outperform the 8600, except when there's a ridiculous amount of textures involved.

I'd get a 9800 or the cheaper 9600 instead of any 8-series card. The 9600 esp gives you very nice performance for the price.

Huh, I just checked another store and found the 9600 for less than the 8800 including rebate.  Have to add that to the list as well.

So are the 8x00 and 9x00 cards good for handeling OpenGL? Would I be safe in that regard no matter which card I get?

Both of those cards are actually overkill for Poser, in other words, they would have no problem rendering in OpenGL. The general rule of thumb for video cards is buy the best card you can afford.

Attached Link: Nvidia's GeForce 9600 GT Tested

The 9600 uses the G94 chip, the "little brother" of the G92 chip that is in the 8800 GT.

What does this mean really for Poser? Probably not that much. But if you want Poser to do preview rendering with hardware assisted shader evaluation, then the more stream processors you have, the better.

The 8800GT has 112 stream processors. The 9600 only has 64.

The 9600 should be compared to the 8600. The 9800 should be compared to the 8800.

I have an 8800 GT and it kicks ass for Poser and for video games.

Future proofing your hardware is a good idea - you can imagine that Poser may do more with the preview shading than it does right now.

I put in an Nvidia 6200 card and it works great with poser . says opengl 2..1.2    and 512 meg memory  - not expensive either if you shop around .    look at the best card you can afford and that you need in the next 6 to 12 months , cause they do change specs fast ..

The first number of an nVidia card means the generation, the second is a performance indicator.
Generation 9 cards are not necessarily faster than generation 8 cards. They do have newer features - I think the 9xxx cards support Shader Model 4.0, whole the 8xxx cards stop at Shader Model 3.0 (Correct me if I'm wrong here).

In general, the performance of an nVidia card is indicated by the second number. In jeneral, you can expect a 9600 to perform roughly equal to a 8600 or 7600.
Then again, there are those suffixes (GS, GT, GTX)  And a 7600GT outperforms a 7900GS, mixing up the numbers rule.
So there's no hard and fast rule.

This isn't exactly true for the 9 series as nVIDIA have made a dramatic change in their lineup... which is that all 9 series cards now have 256 bit RAM.

This is very different then all previous *600 cards which have always had 128 bit RAM. That alone makes the 9600 perform something like 4x of the 8600. It's performance is nearer to that of the 8800. Even that article posted by BB concludes that the 9600 is only 12% slower then the 8800, which is very impressive for a mid range card.

Quite right svdl.

The generation differences also include things like the jump from DX9 support to DX10 support with the 8xxx and 9xxx generations.

The GS/GT/GTX suffixes will indicate a number of things such as the number of vertex shaders, the type of memory supported like DDR/DDR2/DDR3, the memory bandwidth such as 64/128/256/384-bit and so on. The suffix also has a lot to do with the clock frequency of the memory and GPU. The GT and GTX models have higher clock speeds than the GS models.

Then of course you get the GT2 cards which are single-card SLI solutions which have essentially 2 GPU's onboard which share the load of producing the graphical output by each constructing every second scan line of the image. that means that each GPU only has to do half the work it did before (plus of course the overhead of having two GPU's working synchronously in tandem) which makes the graphics sub-system able to produce more output or better output at the same speed as a single card would take to produce a lesser quality image.

It can become very confusing sometimes so a good idea would be to go and look at http://www.tomshardware.com or http://www.anandtech.com and check out some of their info aimed at better understanding the vast number of minor and major differences between the various graphics cards.

Hope this helps and doesn't add to the confusion! :biggrin:

UA

My head hurts.
lol

 A lot of teh reviews I've been reading have siad that while the 8800 is the better card, the 9600 is a better value. But they're all lookingat it froma gaming point of view, not graphic design.

I'm fairly certain that for Poser purposes, either card is more than sufficient for your needs.

I know the 8500 GT I'm using certainly is.