I'm considering getting a new video card ( guess which one) sometime in the future (My Voodoo3 is kinda worn out) and I was wondering if any of you guys could answer this for me: Carrara can be a bit troublesome at times when it comes to anti-aliasing and I was wondering if the built in hardware-based anti-aliasing function of the Ge Force 3 could help eliminate some of them "jaggies" since the Ge Force 3 anti-aliases ALL poly's, regardless of what program you are running. Will Carrara pick up a smoother surface and reduce said "jaggy" count or will it still pick it up as a normal poly and do its thing?

Attached Link: http://www.3dlabs.com

If I am not wrong, Nvidia chips don't support rendering programs like Carrara... the anti-aliassing that is does is just in video memory for page flipping in games. I would recomend one of the cards that 3DLabs makes. Does anyone else know if this is correct about Nvidia?

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/Graphics/GeForce3.html The software has to be written to take advantage of this cards features. Carrara isn't optimized for OpenGL as it has its own proprietery render engin. The card had some problems with lightwave but apparently has been fixed with newer drivers. Maya seems to have optimized their app to use this card under OpenGL. No doudt though, it mainly would help to do faster screen redraws & not the "final" render. That can make a big difference in your workflow if you constantly do area renders for testing.

maybe b/c its so late I am misreading the question, but no video card will get rid of jaggies in your rendering. That has to be corrected with carrara's engine code. the polies that carrara generates are generated with a code base, not a graphics API like opengl or direct3d...other wise your picture would look different between every video card. The cards will help you in the assemble room...the realtime polies and lighting all take advantage of the opengl and d3d api's....but your final picture is a mathatical render that has nothing to do with the hardware on your computer.

btw: I am using a geforce 2 mx in opengl mode and it works great. If I remember correctly Antonie said in the yahoogroups that he recommended the geforce line for users with less than $500 to spend on a graphics card.

Well, looks like it wont affect much after all. Thanks for the info guys. Oh yeah, and I backed out on the GeForce3. Its too pricey so I figured ill buy a GeForce2 Pro instead. I already paid for it, now it just has to arrive in the mail...

dude..you might get pissed off...2 days ago nvidia announced the geforce 3 titanium...you will be able to get a geforce 3 itanium for under 200bucks in like a week or two.... On the plus side the geforce 2 is a great card. Did you know that there is a hack on the net that turns it into a quadro card? its cool...lots of people are having great success with it.