When shopping for a new graphics card for 3D creation and animation (Poser 5, Vue d'esprit and maybe the new Dazstudio later on) what is of most importance: The speed or the memory of the card? And does this go for studio Max also??

the speed of you system bus i more important than the speed of your graphics card i believe sohe amount of memory on you card is important. BUT POSER5/4 is NOT Hardware accelerated anyway so a powerfull graphics card wont help you with Poser.

I'm not an expert, but here's the way I figure it. Poser makes no use of hardware acceleration, so card doesn't matter as long as it gives good Windows 2D acceleration. For Vue then it would be the quality and speed of the OpenX drivers that would matter. Some 3D drivers crash view with Open X enabled, so speed and memory becomes irrelevant for them. On card memory is most important for storing textures, and since Vue has an untextured Open X preview, it shouldn't matter as much as speed. Since details of Daz studio haven't been released yet it's imposible to say what it's requirements would be, but the "teaser" pictures show textured preview so memory might have an impact. Max? No idea. In the end, it will depend on how the applications interact with the graphics card drivers. Can they take advantage of extra memory or do they assume a common minimum? Can the computer hosting the card keep it supplied with information as fast as the card can process it? Are the drivers stable and well written? etc. -- Mark

According to DAZ, the coming DAZ|Studio will have Open-GL support, so a graphics card will be utilized there. But I would rather wait to see the application first before buying a 3D card that supposedly works well with it... As yggdrasil points out, it all depends on the interaction between the card and the application. I had problems with Vue working smoothly with my card, and from what I hear, many 3D apps have issues with different cards. It appears that 3D cards work great for gaming, that is what they are primarily intended for (OK, cynical, but PC users playing games is where the money is), but how they help a 3D application varies a lot.

I have had no problems with NVidia TI or FX series cards' OpenGL support with Lightwave, Cinema 4D, Maya, and Vue d'Espirit if that helps. ;0) Kuroyume