I'm thinking about buying a new computer. The one I'm thinking of has a choice of either an nVidia GeForce Ti 4600 with 128megs of memory or an ATI Radeon 9700 with 128megs. Does anyone have any opinion on which would run better with Vue's OpenGL drivers? -SMT

Well, I'm using the the Ti4600 Steven, and have no complaints at all. I decided on the the MSI, as it had VIVO which I do find very handy. I also looked into the Gainward, but decided against it because both monitor outputs where digital. They do supply Digital-Analoge converters, but I have found that type of setup can cause extra strain on the ouput sockets because the converter protudes out further. The ATI has had good reviews, but being an ATI user in the past, I always found their drivers a bit unreliable...besides if I'm spending that kind of money then I want my card to be big, which the GeForce4 Ti certainly is. Make sure that your case and motherboard can handle the extra length of a GeForce Ti card; It has been known for RAM slots, capaciters and IDE sockets to get in the way. Even within my Antec server case, I have to remove the video card to remove my hard drives and memory sticks ;o) Hope that helps, Cheers

If I do this, it'll be custom built by Alienware using an Intel D850EMV2 motherboard wrapped around a Pentium 4, 2.8GHz processor and a gigabyte of PC-1066 RDRAM in a full tower case. I don't foresee any physical problems. -SMT

Ohh I forgot to mention Steven; Set to default settings in this image, but it can really fly if you play about with these (I believe most GeForce4 Ti manufacturers now have their own tweeking utilities available) ;o)

Sounds good to me Steven, Alienware do seem to make some very impressive kit...2.8 Gigs though, thats just being greedy ;o) Alas I have to resort to making my own and have to put up with testing and discovering all these hardware conflicts and problems...which would probably account for all my grey hairs LOL! Cheers

Yeah, Intel just made the 2.8GHz CPU available. It's not really greedy. Greedy would be getting dual 2.4GHz Xeon's. ;-) BTW: I'll take your suggestion. The Ti4600 actually saves me about $38 over the Radeon 97000

the 9700 is the fastest most advanced card out now..however ATI has had a history of bad deiver support while nividia has had a good but not great history. go for the cheapest u wont be disapointed either way. if they same go for ATI i heard too many good things on it

ATI, dude !!! IMHO, there's no choice ! ;-) Yes, ATI had some big problems with drivers but they looks improving this issue... I don't guarantee you'll have top of the top drivers directly from purchasing, but they'll probably be stable and fonctional. And, from my own experience, really good drivers comes faster with every generation of products they product... I can also say that it's the only actual graphic card supporting DX9. And, if as I supposed in another post, Poser 5 will have a hardware rendering engine -and perhaps Vue 5- you'll not be disapointed... :-) And in fine, I think they deliver an excellent card... My 2 cents opinion... Argentium Thri'ile

"Poser 5 will have a hardware rendering engine- and perhaps VUE 5"...unfortunatelly no. POSER 5's hybrid scanline/raytracing engine is a SOFTWARE renderer.

A graphic card is totally useless for rendering. It only affects the "on-screen" display shading. The reason is simple : your CPU cannot access the data loaded in the graphic card's RAM, neither use its GPU a second rendering unit. A graphic card will provide faster screen refreshing rates, that's all it can do !

But even for display shading, the graphic card only "draws" polygons calculated by the 3D software. Calculating the polygons is the most intensive part of the job, so if you experience crawling display speed, the only solution is to increase the speed of the CPU.

Getting a more powerful graphic card will not make a big difference. The display speed will increase by only 20 or 30 %, but if you double the CPU clock speed, the display shading will be 200 % faster. Moreover, in most cases, 3D softwares doesn't use the graphic card at all. OpenGL and DirectX need consistent data (triangle and texture), something that 3D applications cannot always provide. In wireframe mode, for example, the graphic card's GPU is - most of the time - bypassed.

VUE 4 doesn't use RTTM (real time texture mapping) so the only job left to the graphic card is to draw the triangles of single colored 3D meshes. Even a cheap GeForce 4 MX440 can do this task.

For the price of the latest ATI or Nvidia GPU, you can buy a second 2 GHz Intel or Athlon processor. If you're using your system for 3D, the choice is very simple : get a second processor. Rendering speed and display speed will be improved radically.

Eric

I know Vue has had problems in the past with certain cards, or maybe those cards have had a problem with Vue...whatever. I also know that the video card has nothing to do with actual rendering. BUT...I also know the following: 1. Screen display response has always been my number one beef with Vue. When OpenGL is enabled in Vue on my present system, display updating begins to bog down with even a small number of objects or a low number of polygons. The problem rapidly becomes so bad in either shaded or wireframe mode that I have to switch the display settings to bounding box only, at which point there's no problem update no matter how big the scene gets. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to arrange a scene when all the items in it are boxes. 2. When I disable OpenGL and let the CPU handle everything, I don't have a problem until I start getting to medium to large scenes at which time display response become progressively worse. Unfortunately Vue doesn't offer any choice but wireframe when OpenGL is off. 3. Vue's wireframe performance is much better when OpenGL is off than when it's on. This leads me to believe that the video card is somehow involved in the OpenGL wireframe display. IF this is true, then a faster card means faster screen response in OpenGL mode, which is my primary concern. Unfortunately, if I go, with Alienware, as I plan to, there's more than $2000 difference between the top end single CPU system and the top end dual CPU system. Also, the top dual system doesn't support the new PC-1066 RDRAM, and I've head a lot lately about RAM speed being a major bottleneck.

Hi auditiy, might be a tad OT, but still--with the latest breed of floating-point precision pixel and vertex shader hardware, even raytracing can be (theoretically) accellerated on a graphics board. RenderMan shaders can be run with multipass rendering, too, provided you write a new backend for the graphics board. Alias|Wavefront among others (Pixar, for example) are already implementing an on-GPU rendering path for their applications. Off-loading render work unto a graphics board can yield fantastic performance gains, and both the Radeon9700 and the soon-to-be-announced Nvidia NV30 will be adequately suited for such work. At any rate, I strongly doubt this will be relevant for Vue users. ;) ta, -Sascha.rb

Attached Link: http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/rtongfx/

Still OT, but an interesting paper (cf. link) @smallspace, I completely agree with your summary of Vue's viewport "capabilities," with one minor beef: I don't think that the actual computation power of a VGA makes that much of a difference, for Vue's OpenGL implementation. Even on my Ti4400, OpenGL render is very very slow. Compare this to Lightwave 7's OpenGL viewport, which even features real-time motion blur, or trueSpace 6's backed textures support . . . ;) Regarding Vue and render hardware: those friends of mine with ATi boards have a lot less issues with the OpenGL viewport than those with NV hardware. But then, this seems to be highly dependant on one's system configuration to begin with. ATi may have had a bad track record with their drivers, but the situation is improving, somewhat. Nonetheless, NV is still the leader in the field of customer VGA drivers. If you don't game a whole lot at very high resolutions and with Anti-Aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled, the Ti4600 isn't that much slower than the Radeon9700. ta, -Sascha.rb

Eric, So your suggestion is a dual processor system? How much ram? And which video card? I would love to speed up my rendering speed. I am using a 900 Mhz system now, but want to upgrade soon. A big fast, smart video card is nice, but not required, right? SO what would the ultimate system be?

Hi whtbearfan, I hope you don't mind if I answer your as well ;o) I've just finished building my second dualie, and although it is not my ultimate dream system, it is no slouch: ----------------------------------------- 1 x Antec SX1040 Case 1 x Plextor PlexWriter 40r40w12rw 1 x Toshiba 16xDVD 48xCD 1 x VideoLogic SonicFury 2 X IBM Deskstar 120GXP 41.2GB 2 x AMD Athlon MP 2000+ 1.67Ghz 2 X Crucial 512MB PC2100 RAM (1Gig Total) 1 X ASUS A7M266-D 1 X MSI GeForce4 Ti4600 128MB DDR ------------------------------------------ I must just add one thing that I feel is very important on dual Athlon rigs, and that is ventilation. I would always recommend a large case, and plenty of exhaust fans so airflow is at it's best (on this system I have 4 80mm case fans). One thing I would change would be the hard drives, as IBM "Deathstar's" are prone to failing, although the speed of them is very impressive. Even for non "dual friendly" applications, there is an advantage; you can heavily multitask and hardly see any system slowdown. Cheers

The only thing that I would correct in Cheers post is that it's bet to have 4 RAM (of 256 or 512 if you have extra bucks) for optimizing memory usage with dual proc. Hope it can helps Argentium Thri'ile