I want to improve Poser' 7's performance and am considering a new video card.  (Mine present card is a diamond HD2600 with 512 mem and it is too slow) I keep getting conflicting information on what card to buy and I don't know what to do.

 

1:  Some suggest a workstation card.  These are for CAD and graphics.  These cards apparently have a different instruction set that speeds things up.  The problem is no one (even at e frontier) is sure if Poser can use these instructions and as they are real expensive that would be a waste of money.

 

2. Video card memory.  I've been told that the video card memory holds textures.  I do run out of RAM memory for textures (I have the max Ram of 4 gig for XP) and if the card can hold textures then a large video ram is worth the money.  The question is how much and what kind.

 

3.  Most of the cards are for gamers.  I don't play games and just do video, poser and photoshop (CS3).  It doesn't make much sense to spend big bucks for a gamer card if a lower end card would do the job. 

 

4. I cannot find out for sure if any kind of new card would speed up rendering.  The most common answer is no, not directly.  However, a faster card with more memory could off load the processor and thereby speed up rendering.

 

There is an unbelievable array of video cards 4350, 4650,4750, 4850 (50 or 70)  There is DDR2, DDR3, GDR2, GDR3 and I think GDR5.   Memory goes from 256 to 1 gig.  There is Diamond, ATI, NVIDIA and on and on.  I simply don't want to buy a top dollar card that requires a new power supply if I don't need it.  (Since I also do video a HDMI jack would be useful) I still want great performance.

 

I would really appreciate some input.

 

Thanks

Fred