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GPU's for Autodesk Products

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polycounter lvl 18
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Super polycounter lvl 18
I know these threads are dull. I've searched and read whats already on the forum but there's no real conclusion to find. Since I'm putting together a new build and typically the issue of GPU rears it's ugly head as usual.

Read countless topics on various CG forums, opinions are mixed. Some swear by Quadro ONLY, calling Geforce garbage for serious work. Others claiming the reverse. A lot of people showing benchmarks and citing numbers rather than real-world experiences though.

So do people have experience of using a 680 or 780 with Maya or Mudbox ? If going Geforce it's a toss up between a 4GB 680 or 3GB 780 but I'm concerned about viewport performance really. Currently a 500k mesh runs like crap on my 560Ti and I'd really like to be able to tumble and rotate around a couple of million polys without issue.

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  • passerby
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    passerby polycounter lvl 12
    it depends on the kinda work you want to do, quadro's are superior, if your working with archViz or or working with applications like autoCad and solidworks, since it is good at work with anti-alised wire frames.

    If you want to work in games, than you need the same hardware the games are meant to run on, so geforce all the way quadro cards will struggle with the shaders used for real-time game art, or just not work with them at all, so for this a gameing card is needed.
  • MM
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    MM polycounter lvl 17
    AMD Firepro W7000 here. Mudbox is blazing fast, i can sculpt on 80mil tri model at close to 30fps. I used to have a GTX 460 and it was almost a 300% boost in speed from that. I tried a Quadro 4000 before going AMD and it was barely any faster than GTX 460. Also, latest PC games run very very fast on this as well which was a surprise to me. UDK, cryengine, Toolbag2, everything runs fine and fast.

    As for Maya, I have seen people get those dreaded Maya crashes even with highend end Quadors. so no escaping Maya crashes no matter what GPU you get.
  • Super
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    Super polycounter lvl 18
    Yeah, I'm not so much concerned with games work as I am dealing with high poly models within Maya and Mudbox and texturing with Photoshop and Mari. Hence my thinking of higher GPU RAM would be better but who knows.

    Highest Quadro I could afford would be a K4000 which comes in around £600. The 780 is around £400. I'm just concerned about it *working*, specifically within those programs. I'll play no games at all so that doesn't bother me. I recall hearing 7xx series were *really* buggy in 3D apps but I can't recall where now. Don't fancy wasting £400 on a broken card with Xmas around the corner.
  • MM
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    MM polycounter lvl 17
    Quadro K4000 has issues with Mudbox as far as i know. it is also not certified by Autodesk last time i checked. k4000 is $800 and for quite a bit less, you can get firepro w7000 @ $660 which will run all your dev tools as far as my experience with it tells me.
  • Eric Chadwick
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    One thing I've been finding, I'm using a laptop more and more these days, and you need a dedicated graphics chip (of course) but only the NVIDIA drivers seem to allow me to force applications to use the discrete GPU instead of the weaker integrated GPU.

    AMD doesn't seem to have that control.
  • noktek
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    noktek polycounter lvl 7
    Hello folks! Ill try to resurrect this thread instead of making a new one, hows the situation as of May 2014? I've made a thread on tomshardware and to my surprise i have not been advised for Nvidias by 110% of the population, but it is almost a 50% 50% battle because of some OpenCL i was completely unaware of... any toughts???
    I too dabble in mudbox most of the time, and it is the app in which my bottleneck-gpu really stands out...
  • RobeOmega
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    RobeOmega polycounter lvl 10
    How does Nvidia compare vs AMD in general I have notice the ones of you who I have found your PC spec mostly have nvida cards or is that coincidence?
  • seb3d
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    seb3d polycounter lvl 11
    i personally prefer nVidia. some years ago i had an ati fire gl and was not very happy. so i switched. maybe it has changed but i didn´t try.
    i can not say having a quadro is better than gForce. i have two workstation one with a gtx770 and one with quadro 4000. both run well and pretty stable. the 770 is newer and therefor i think framerates in maya and also the performance in mari is slightly better. for the openCL thing i can be wrong but i understood that nVidia supports openCL but ati no cuda so you are more save with nVidia!
  • Anchang-Style
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    Anchang-Style polycounter lvl 7
    AMD only supports OpenCL, NVIDIA does OpenCL and CUDA. Both only support OpenCL until 1.1 as of right now, eventhough 2.0 is out already.
  • m4dcow
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    m4dcow interpolator
    Robeomega wrote: »
    How does Nvidia compare vs AMD in general I have notice the ones of you who I have found your PC spec mostly have nvida cards or is that coincidence?

    I believe they have gotten alot better, but AMD/ATI cards have had quite a few driver issues that would cause issues with certain programs, which is why I tend to stick with Nvidia stuff on any work machines.
  • PolyHertz
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    PolyHertz polycount lvl 666
    afaik AMD doesn't gimp their consumer cards like NVidia does for double point precision, so wouldn't they be better overall these days? Personally I'd just grab a Titan for those that can afford it.
  • noktek
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    noktek polycounter lvl 7
    a titan? arent titans like two gpus in one? I've always heard that to most apps the second gpu is useless?
    i think ive made up my mind for a gtx780, even tho the sweet spot on the price/performance curve should be the 770.. laziness&thefuture
  • haiddasalami
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    haiddasalami polycounter lvl 14
    Whatever you do make sure your laptop manufacturer drivers are signed with ATI/AMD. I had an acer and I could not get updates from AMD but only through Acer and well they never updated their graphics drivers :/ Laptop is now dead and probably just stick to tablets.
  • PolyHertz
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    PolyHertz polycount lvl 666
    noktek wrote: »
    a titan? arent titans like two gpus in one? I've always heard that to most apps the second gpu is useless?
    i think ive made up my mind for a gtx780, even tho the sweet spot on the price/performance curve should be the 770.. laziness&thefuture

    No only the Titan Z is a dual-GPU, the regular Titan and Titan Black are single GPUs.

    From anandTech:
    "GTX 780 can offer 90% of GTX Titan’s gaming performance, but it can only offer a fraction of GTX Titan’s FP64 compute performance, topping out at 1/24th FP32 performance rather than 1/3rd like Titan. Titan essentially remains as NVIDIA’s entry-level compute product, leaving GTX 780 to be a high-end gaming product."

    for our type of work, even the 480 will give you better performance then the 600 or 700 series since NVidia has gimped them so hard for everything past gaming.
  • noktek
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    noktek polycounter lvl 7
    So ive seen some videos comparing 780 780ti quadros and titan and while the titan is unarguably faster i think at this point of my life it does not make sense to spend that much.. so i got myself a 780. What i can say is that it is good, as expected, but now i see that the bottleneck is my CPU, at least for mudbox sculpting... so consider that fellow compulsive buyers!
  • Inhert
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    Inhert polycounter lvl 9
    noktek wrote: »
    So ive seen some videos comparing 780 780ti quadros and titan and while the titan is unarguably faster i think at this point of my life it does not make sense to spend that much.. so i got myself a 780. What i can say is that it is good, as expected, but now i see that the bottleneck is my CPU, at least for mudbox sculpting... so consider that fellow compulsive buyers!

    I thought mudbox is dependent on your graphics card VRAM and the amount of RAM you have on your computer? If it's CPU then it must be Zbrush then.
  • thomasp
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    thomasp hero character
    i might have to upgrade in the immediate future for a project and am looking at an intermediate replacement for my graphics card with as much RAM as possible. geometry performance is not such a concern, nor does the card have to last me for years. also, nvidia only.

    there's a geforce 770 with 4GB out for relatively little which looks ideal for the job, specifically texturing in mudbox. anybody have one and experience to share?

    also of interest: what are the experiences with nvidia drivers, those 7-series cards and 3ds max these days (OS would be windows 7)?
  • RobeOmega
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    RobeOmega polycounter lvl 10
    thomasp wrote: »
    nvidia only. ?


    I still need an explanation behind this I was about to get a 270x but im holding off if that is a bad option
  • Eric Chadwick
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    I have a Nvidia GT 750M in my laptop, works well with 3ds Max, etc. 3d softs, and games.

    Like I said before, when students of mine have AMD cards the drivers do not seem to offer an option to force apps to use the card. Instead many apps would default to the shitty motherboard GPU, usually an Intel one. Nvidia's control panel let us override this, forcing apps to use the better GPU.

    Maybe AMD has fixed this in recent drivers, like within the last couple months? I have steered clear of AMD/ATI cards due to longstanding performance problems with 3ds Max in DirectX mode.
  • thomasp
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    thomasp hero character
    Robeomega wrote: »
    I still need an explanation behind this I was about to get a 270x but im holding off if that is a bad option

    i'm in the same boat as eric here - for as long as i have been in 3D, ATI has always been known for drivers that don't play nice with max or CG apps for that matter. that might have changed in the meantime, it might not be true for certain professional series cards but i don't fancy spending time finding out.

    oh and - being a long time marmoset user and following the corresponding topics here on polycount it's hard to overlook that lots of glitches seem to be related to users running it with ATI cards.

    all i want is more texture RAM at this stage, if i could just bolt it onto the existing card, that would be the best outcome actually. ;)
  • StephenVyas
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    StephenVyas polycounter lvl 18
    Just picked up my new comp with a GTX 780.

    If you'd like me to run a few tests for you, to help you decide.. shoot a message to my inbox.
  • Gnutmi
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    Gnutmi polycounter lvl 10
    I have a 4gb 760gtx that I used this last year for my uni assignments. The vram was a huge upgrade from my 1gb 6850 and I'm more then satisfied with the card so far.
    I used 15 4k UDIMS with multiple layers for texturing and never had a problem so far. I had the same amount (or even more) textures in Maya viewport with layered shaders etc and never had a crash. Then when I took my scene to the 650Ti's and 460GTX's in my uni lab I had to disable textures and smooth at render time.
    But then again I'm just a student and there are people way more qualified than me:)
    [ame="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gigabyte-GeForce-Graphics-DisplayPort-Windforce/dp/B00FQ8CNNI/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1400315694&sr=8-2&keywords=gtx+760+gigabyte"]This is the card I have[/ame]
  • thomasp
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    thomasp hero character
    thanks guys,

    i just found out that the 770's are too large to fit into my computer without causing some shuffling of parts so it'll be a GTX 760 with 4GB instead. seems to consume less power too which is always a bonus.

    i don't have specific scenarios to test but if you happen to use 3ds max / mudbox / toolbag2 with your cards and don't happen to run into display issues or stability problems, that would be reassuring to hear.

    and Gnutmi, that definitely sounds good so far. you're on windows 7?
  • Gnutmi
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    Gnutmi polycounter lvl 10
    Yes I'm on W7. I use all those 3 programs on a regular basis and never had any issues.
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