I've already posted this over on the Cornucopia forums, but haven't had much by way of replies, so I figured I'd try it here.

I've come to the conclusion that Vue hates my graphics card. It's an Asus 6850 DirectCU, and it doesn't seem to matter whether I have the latest drivers or if I have the OpenGL set to hardware pipeline, it still crashes. I'm presently using the software setting for OpenGL and it seems that I can at least edit all materials for an object without the program flipping me off and crashing. It's not perfect, but better.

Anyway, after consulting with my partner, it's been decided that I should look into maybe building a workstation rig purely for creating my artwork. This would mean I can shoot zombies in the face on my present rig, while the workstation deals with renders.

At present, I'm thinking that a E3 Xeon CPU (4 cores/8 threads) and an Nvidia workstation GPU will be the order of the day. I'm hoping a Quadro K600 would be enough for the GPU, as it's a bit of a financial leap from that to something like the Quadro K2000. If I'm wrong in my thoughts for CPU and/or GPU, do feel free to correct me. Maybe an i7 would be better.

If I could get some help on what might be a decent, but affordable, build for Vue to run on, that would be great. The emphasis is really on affordable as I'm:

a) A miser, and

b) Don't have a lot of money

My present rig is a Phenom II x6 1090t, 12GB of 1333 RAM, 6850 GPU and Vue 11 Studio (hoping to upgrade to Complete asap). I'd prefer something that performs better than what I have now.

Thanks in advance :biggrin:

I have just bought a new pc for 3d rendering , one of the programs I use is vue 10. it also had to be good for gaming as well ,I spent a good while do a bit of research and this is the specs of the set up I bought

Products ordered:

• 23211|23206 - 2TB Sata III Hard Drives (4TB Total) x 2 (69.00 GBP)
• 23208|23206 - £60 PC Build Charge, FREE UK Delivery, FREE Shockproof Packaging + FREE 1 Year Standard Warranty Package x 1 (59.99 GBP)
• ZPSU-CORSAIR-1050HX - Corsair Pro Series HX1050 80+ 1050W PSU x 1 (160.00 GBP)
• 23216|23206 - Nvidia Geforce GTX Titan 6GB Graphics Card x 1 (805.98 GBP)
• 23214|23206 - 32GB Corsair Vengeance 1600MHz Gaming RAM x 1 (325.99 GBP)
• 23212|23206 - Intel Core i7 4770K 4-Core Haswell CPU @ 4.4GHz x 1 (290.99 GBP)
• 23209|23206 - 300MBs Wireless PCI Card WiFi Network Adaptor x 1 (14.99 GBP)
• 23213|23206 - Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD4H Motherboard x 1 (152.99 GBP)
• 23207|23206 - 24x DVD-RW Optical Drive x 1 (19.99 GBP)
• • Windows 7 Professional Upgrade, £36.00, Payment under LW 107699 x 1 (74.99 GBP)
• 23215|23206 - Vibox Predator Green Gaming Case x 1 (49.99 GBP)
• 23217|23206 - Zalman CNP S12X CPU Cooler x 1 (67.99 GBP)
• being lazy I just copied and pasted my invoice in this bit.
• performance in vue is outstanding compared to my previous machine titan graphics card is reconized by vue and works perfectly .allthough vue dosnt use it for rendering
• I prefercore I7 cpu (haswell) as i remember seeing on the net some test comparing I7 to xeon with I7 being faster and a lot cheaper sorry dont have the link  hope this is of some use to you.

Thanks for the reply, iborg64. That's a nice rig, though way out of my price range.

The Xeon's compare pretty well to the i7's. An E3 1230 V3 (Haswell) Xeon costs about £190 and looks comparable to an i7 4770 (non K) performance wise. At least if this anything to go off http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E3-1230+v3+%40+3.30GHz&id=1942

Would really like to find out if the workstation GPU's are worth the investment, or whether something like a GTX 660/760 would be suitable. I know that the drivers for AMD's workstation cards aren't as good as Nvidia's. Which is why Nvidia rule the roost when it comes to workstation cards. More than anything, I just want a rig that helps Vue to run more stable. I've never had a program that crashes as much as Vue does. At times it feels like trying to work with a petulant child. Some scenes it will have maybe a hiccup or too along the way, but be otherwise fine. Other times it persists in flipping me off and crashing.

I agree with your comments on vue regular saves are the way to go ,I have a system by which first save is scene name 1 then small changes will be scene 1a 1b 1c etcthen big changes become scene 2 then 2a 2b 2c etc that way I can always go back only a small step rather than having to redo loads . since having the new system vue has not crashed on me yet (touch wood). one thing I have discovered which I was un aware of , i have a gamers keyboard with a small display that amongs other things show cpu usage and RAM usage it would appear vue holds on to the ram more and more as time goes by , the picture Im about to put in the gallery used 17% of my 32GB of RAM when everything was in the scene , eventually after multiple test renders but only changing atmosphere and moving the dinos RAM usage went up to 71% Exiting VUE before the final render put the used RAM back to 17%

Quote - Thanks for the reply, iborg64. That's a nice rig, though way out of my price range.

The Xeon's compare pretty well to the i7's. An E3 1230 V3 (Haswell) Xeon costs about £190 and looks comparable to an i7 4770 (non K) performance wise. At least if this anything to go off http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E3-1230+v3+%40+3.30GHz&id=1942

Would really like to find out if the workstation GPU's are worth the investment, or whether something like a GTX 660/760 would be suitable. I know that the drivers for AMD's workstation cards aren't as good as Nvidia's. Which is why Nvidia rule the roost when it comes to workstation cards. More than anything, I just want a rig that helps Vue to run more stable. I've never had a program that crashes as much as Vue does. At times it feels like trying to work with a petulant child. Some scenes it will have maybe a hiccup or too along the way, but be otherwise fine. Other times it persists in flipping me off and crashing.

My personal opinion: I would save the money for the workstation card or invest in a better GTX type card. I have been running Vue since version 4 with several different GTX cards and they were all very good. Never had any iussues with stability after I upgraded the ram. I am currently using an ASUS GTX 670 DirectCU with 2Gb. It works very well. Vue does not utilize any of the high end features of the workstation cards. Those are mostly aimed at CAD and high end 3D packages. Vue uses the card predominantly simply for display similar to a computer game. Hence a good game card is typically also a good Vue card. Don't get me wrong, the work station cards are nice, I had a couple of quadros on one of my systems and they worked very well with Vue, but for the price you can get a lot more power with a game card.

Ciao

TD

Incremental saves are what I got told to do when I blew a fuse and posted a rant on the Cornucopia 3D forums, lol. At the point of time Vue wasn't writing the saves properly either. shakes head

Regular saves are supposed to be the way to go with most programs like Vue. But with Vue I'd say they're extremely important as you just never know when it's going to get its freak on and start crashing or doing other kinds of weird stuff. Despite all the issues, I do like Vue, and I will persevere with it. Though I do think the fact it has a compatability mode is kind of a red flag about its stability issues, lol.

Regarding the memory, I think Vue is one of those programs that will happily use as much memory as you give it. It's probably much the same with VRAM as it is with regular RAM. Can't test that myself though as I only have a 1GB card, and won't be able to afford anything above a 2GB GTX 760 unless Nvidia cut their prices again.

Thanks for the reply, thd777. I'll probably opt for the GTX 660 or 760 then. The K600 only has 1GB of GDDR3, whereas the gaming cards will have 2GB of GDDR5 which should perform better.

For some time I have been using a couple of 6 core/12 thread i7's with 64 gb ram and a gtx560 and it flies, I can recommend them.  Of course, I would like a pair of 12 core/24 thread Xeons but on my budget... dream on!

I really don't have the money to fund 6 core i7's. I'm still undecided on an i7 4770K as they're about £70 more than the Xeon I'm looking at. The downside with the Xeon is it can't really be overclocked. But then, it seems to be a bit of a lottery as to whether the i7 4770K you get can overclock beyond 4.3 Ghz, because Intel went cheap on the TIM.

There's no sense in me getting anything beyond 4 cores/8 threads as I can't afford Vue Infinite, and the artist series are limited to 8 threads -which sucks!