Hi. Does the type of video card in your system effect rendering speed? If so, my current card has 32MB of memory. If I upgraded to a card with 64MB would my rendering speed significantly increase?? Thanks in advance for your help.

nighthawk,

Your video card will not impact rendering speed. It may help the screen update while modeling if you are using one of the accelerated video modes in the 3D View. However I wouldn't use that as an excuse to upgrade your video unless you are also looking for faster game performance or something. The software renderer in the 3D view is very snappy and much more reliable.

Best regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Freeware and commercial 3D extensions
http://digitalcarversguild.com

nt

Eric is dead on for this one. I have a geforce 3 and it is smooth as silk for me even without the glide drivers but I got it for gaming. The speed in Carrara was a side effect that I really enjoy but Voodoo 3 was doing just fine before for C. -Kix

although, doesn't the amount of memory on the card affect how much texture-map information can be stored on the card. the idea being that the more you can store on the card, the fewer times you have to access the hard drive and system ram which should yield faster render times? please correct me if i'm wrong. -pix

pix, Except that Carrara won't use any texture memory from your card. That is strictly for the display. In a few years that might be different, the high end packages are just starting to think about using video cards to actually do the rendering. It won't be ray tracing or GI, but in many cases the scene doesn't really need that. I think ATI just announced a plugin for MAX that will use the professional level cousin to the Radeon 9700 to render scenes. More system RAM will help render times, if you don't have enough to hold the whole scene, because you won't have to hit the harddrive. If you have enough RAM for the whole scene, then that won't make a difference either. Best regards, Eric Winemiller Digital Carvers Guild Freeware and commercial 3D extensions http://digitalcarversguild.com

Thanks Eric, But that brings up more questions... If the extra RAM on the graphics card only helps display, what kind of benefits are we talking about? Is this increased frame rate in games/ movie playback, smoother scrolling, and support for higher resolutions? I've also heard that Jaguar was going to offload all of the operating system graphics to the video card. so in that sense, a better video card would mean a smoother moving UI, right? Lastly, what about cards with the dual monitor support. Say you've got 2 displays running off an ATI 9000 with 64MB of RAM. Basically that's 32 per display. would there be an advantage to buying a PCI graphics board for one of the displays so that you could have the AGP and full 64megs dedicated to your main monitor? thanks again for the previous info, and thanks in advance for any more info you have. -pix

pix,

Some of this is just educated guess, so take what you want.

Is this increased frame rate in games/ movie playback, smoother scrolling, and support for higher resolutions?

Yes, no, maybe, and yes. Games yes, if your previous card didn't have enough memory to keep the textures you need in memory. If it did, memory and graphic chip speed will make more difference. For example the 64meg Geforce4 4200 is typically a few frames faster in most games than the 128meg because the memory is clocked faster on the 64meg. However, some of the newer games that use lots of large textures that will reverse. The 64meg doesn't have enough space so spends more time getting the textures from main memory.

As far as I know memory will not impact video playback.

Scrolling, probably not, but maybe if the driver was doing stuff like caching bitmaps in video memory.

And finally certainly yes for higher resolutions, but that probably won't make much impact anymore. 1600x1200x32 takes less than 8meg for a frame buffer. You have to look pretty hard to find a video card that has less than 32meg these days.

I've also heard that Jaguar was going to offload all of the operating system graphics to the video card. so in that sense, a better video card would mean a smoother moving UI, right?

Yes, from what I understand Jaquar will generate textures of windows and use the video cards 3D engine for the transparency effects and so forth. Theoretically more video memory would mean more textures (windows) could be kept in video memory so the UI would be snappier. My only Mac has a Geforce2 MX with 64meg I think so I can't really say "oh, 64meg peformance is way better than 32meg". I have nothing to compare it to.

Lastly, what about cards with the dual monitor support. Say you've got 2 displays running off an ATI 9000 with 64MB of RAM. Basically that's 32 per display.

Probably not, I would image that the card would allocate whatever each display needed so if one monitor is 1600x1200x32 it gets about 8meg and the other at 640x480x8 gets about 300k. The rest is used for texture memory, double buffering, etc. This is pure speculation though.

would there be an advantage to buying a PCI graphics board for one of the displays so that you could have the AGP and full 64megs dedicated to your main monitor?

These days, at least on the PC side, you can get a wicked fast video card that will drive two monitors for about $100. On the Mac side it's a little more expensive, but still reasonable. I can't imagine that having an extra PCI card would do much for you except suck up a precious PCI slot and most of the time vendors won't release PCI versions of their fastest card so you end up putting a lowerend card in the PCI slot. Again, pure speculation, but that might be an interesting experiment. Personally, if I was building a machine from scratch I'd go for a single AGP card. I do use a dual monitor machine in the day job and there I have two video cards, mostly because I had the PCI video card laying around collecting dust so why not save myself a few bucks and use it.

Best regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Freeware and commercial 3D extensions
http://digitalcarversguild.com

thanks,

now, you can completely ignore this if you want 'cause this thread is getting huge, but i've installed jaguar on a bunch of different macs now and have a better frame of reference as to different speeds of different graphics boards on different machines.

anyway...
the G4 dual 1Ghz with nVidia Ti 128 is plenty fast, but the ATI tv 32 i have in the PCI slot so I can run my second CRT blows. It is much slower at refreshing the screen just in the operating system.

the G4 400 with AGP2x ATI 16MB is also almost fast enough.

and even the G3 266 with onboard 2MB ATI is surprisingly fast (although it poops out at 1152x870). But the 16MB iXmicro PCI card I have in this machine is slower than snails. Unfortunately I need to use it as my main monitor card because I have to have at least 1280x1024.

Basically, once you get over the 16/32 hurdle, as long as you have AGP, I think you should be quite satisfied. The speed benefits of running both monitors off of the AGP far outway anything a PCI board could do. ( I have no idea how this would all hold up for gaming, since i don't do it) and lastly, all the PCI boards i used are old, so it's not really a fair comparison becuase the processors are probably slower on them than their AGP counterparts.

-pix