Any recommendations on Graphic Aceleration Cards? Nvidia or Quadro or? Thanks

I myself use the new ATI 9700 Pro 128 mg card and it's wicked fast! I am really happy with it.

Thanks clay, I love my ATI Radeon, been drooling over that Pro card though.

ATI is fast and good value for money. The drivers of Nvidia are usually much better though.

I've got a GeForce4 128 mb card and it does an excellent job. My render times have speeded up tremendously since I got it. Catlin

That's new to me. I always thought the vid-card didn't help with rendering? Only with the OpenGL view, but that's not used in the final render.

I also got a new Mboard, Hdrive and 1Gb ddr ram so the whole thing working together is great. Catlin

Re: thread #6... You've also gotta understand that most newer graphics cards have a good bit of memory on them. Which then frees up more RAM memory and processor time for the CPU. So even though Bryce doesn't benefit a whole lot from the graphics board, it still benefits from freed resources. As for my mom's cheesy computer that I use to get online has some intel based motherboard graphics (HP Pavillion 8755C.) Which is somewhat the opposite. It does truecolor and stuff nicely, but pushing it with rendering etc. bogs a bit and seems to slowdown and goes to virtual memory (needs more RAM.) I can't complain too much though, it still gets me online. :)

I've got a quadro2 - nice card, but I think it's advantageous only in Max, I don't remember seeing any gains in Bryce. If I wasn't using Max and was buying now I'd get a Radeon pro and spend the cost difference on RAM or going with serial ATA for the hard disk. (That said if you have loads of cash to blow you can send me a new QuadroFX 2000 and I would be eternally your friend :-))

It's good to dream Gog...........8)

Aye, I understand what you are saying, Catlin, but it was the Motherboard/Processor/Ram upgrade that actually made the difference. Same with you Pauljs... The way to test it is to, obviously, change only the graphics card. On one of my systems, an AMD 1.5, we tested it with three cards, on my personal benchmark file. The file consists of only four different objects with four different textures, running the spectrum of transparency, reflectivity, volumetrics, and blah blah... The three cards were 1) Graphics Blaster TNT(1), PCI, 16MB. 2)Chaintech Geforce 2, AGP, 32MB. 3)Asus Geforce 4 MX 440, AGP, 64MB DDR. There was 1 second difference between the TNT and the Geforce 4. On a 30-minute render time. These cards have absolutely nothing to do with Bryce, except when you are in Open GL or Direct X preview modes. Even the Nvidia Quadro card will do absolutely nothing for your render times. Bryce was made to run on any machine with enough RAM, be it a P-2 200, or a AMD 2400+, or whatever! Which totally sucks. If future versions of Bryce cannot incorporate at the LEAST, and Unreal 1-quality preview mode, or even better rendering support for hardware acceleration, I fear I'll just keep Bryce 5 and not give Corel any more of my hard earned money...

If corel ever makes another bryce at all.

I should have also said that I upgraded the CPU to a 2.2GHz Athlon and you're right shadow that's what made the real difference. The graphics card comes into it's own when using something like Maya or Poser, thats when the cards onboard 128 mb of ram makes a big difference. Catlin