How Good is GTX 295 with 3D Coat vs 8800GT?

[kay_Eva]

Yes. Right now if I reach 11M triangles in 3dCoat the lag makes it difficult to do anything else after that point. Which is still far better than blender's 4 Million tri ceiling. So I was considering for someone out there who knows, how much better is the 295 vs the 8800GT in 3D Coat?

And I have sli hooked up for 2 8800GTs. Will I see any benefit moving from that to a GTX 295? How many triangles can you comfortably sculpt at if you have a 295 thanks.

btw does 3dcoat even take advantage of Sli?

and should i get a 700mb or 1000mb card

[AbnRanger]

Yes. Right now if I reach 11M triangles in 3dCoat the lag makes it difficult to do anything else after that point. Which is still far better than blender's 4 Million tri ceiling. So I was considering for someone out there who knows, how much better is the 295 vs the 8800GT in 3D Coat?

And I have sli hooked up for 2 8800GTs. Will I see any benefit moving from that to a GTX 295? How many triangles can you comfortably sculpt at if you have a 295 thanks.

btw does 3dcoat even take advantage of Sli?

and should i get a 700mb or 1000mb card

GTX 295 may be good if you're really into gaming, on the same machine, but for Content Creation applications, I don't know of any yet that take advantage of the 2nd GPU/SLI.

You're better served, going the GTX 275 route, IMHO. I bought the GTS 250 1GB VRAM, and everything's working nicely. Pretty sweet price/performance ratio, and you're set for the new OpenGL 3 standard, when that becomes more widely used

[Javis]

No SLI for 3DC as far as I know. But, I can say one thing for certain... I just switched to a GT 275 w/1.8GB GDDR3. It screams and slices through voxels like they are butter on Win and Linux. I sometimes question why I bought the card, but then I turn on 3DC and use voxels and am quickly reminded why.

If you have the money and want to sculpt voxels with relative smoothness up to 50-60million resolution, then by all means dive on in.

[kay_Eva]

No SLI for 3DC as far as I know. But, I can say one thing for certain... I just switched to a GT 275 w/1.8GB GDDR3. It screams and slices through voxels like they are butter on Win and Linux. I sometimes question why I bought the card, but then I turn on 3DC and use voxels and am quickly reminded why.

If you have the money and want to sculpt voxels with relative smoothness up to 50-60million resolution, then by all means dive on in.

Hm, really!?

Forgive me for being skeptical, but do you have a screenshot of you sculpting at such an out of this world resolution? I mean... in blender you can only sculpt to about 4 million. So 50 million looks like a lot to me. Or maybe Andrew can comment on how exactly 3dCoat scales?

But yeah that's really great if it's really that way. I'm sorry if I sound skeptical about it so far. And as I've said, If I sculpt to about 9 million on my 8800GT I begin to get uncomfortable lag. Not too much but to the point where there is a .2 second delay on somewhat finer movements of the pen. Generally the higher the resolution the finer the detail so... And at 11 Million I no longer can move the pen with precision while operating on voxels.

But yeah, if 3dCoat scales that well then I probably will get an upgrade. In fact I've already got a vid card from newegg in my checkout menu. Just waiting on a little more confirmation and as I've said if you've got a screenshot that would be some pretty good confirmation in my book. I just want to witness this high of a resolution being used on a practical level. As opposed to just an extreme situation. Even if it "only" gets to 30 million, as opposed to 50, it would justify the price of a new card in my opinion.

thanks for the info!

[LJB]

Well on my i7 with 295gtx I only manage a workable 22 million, But you can get round that limit by hiding parts of the model I can push entire count easily to Jarvis levels but i simply could not work intuitively with everthing on display.

[kay_Eva]

Well on my i7 with 295gtx I only manage a workable 22 million, But you can get round that limit by hiding parts of the model I can push entire count easily to Jarvis levels but i simply could not work intuitively with everthing on display.

ah so I see. When I stated that I can sculpt at 9 million I mean 9 million including hidden stuff. 4 million is as far as it goes for everything showing. For Blender 2 million is the workability limit, at 4 million it crashes. So you're saying you can look at 22 million on screen at once and it's pretty smooth? If so I might get that upgrade.

I was even thinking for a second to go buy Zbrush to compliment 3D Coat, but I'd rather get a $600 graphics card than a $600 graphics program when I already have blender and 3dCoat. *heh heh heh*

In all honesty I would only get the GTX 295 if it's reeeeally reallly worth it. I've been reading reviews and it looks pretty awesome. Hopefully it would last me 3 years at least before having another upgrade.

[WillBellJr]

You may want to look at the reviews at Newegg.com and see what comparisions you can find there.

As far as $600 for ZBrush, or a graphics card, considering how ZBrush upgrades have been since I bought in a v2, your $600 may go way further with ZBrush than with hardware which will most likely be outdated in another year or so...

-Will

[kay_Eva]

You may want to look at the reviews at Newegg.com and see what comparisions you can find there.

As far as $600 for ZBrush, or a graphics card, considering how ZBrush upgrades have been since I bought in a v2, your $600 may go way further with ZBrush than with hardware which will most likely be outdated in another year or so...

-Will

hmmm, come to think of it my Zbrush performance isn't all that much better than 3d Coat. And most of it's features would be pretty redundant for me other than the brushes. $600 brushes... I don't know

I might not buy anything to be honest

[akira]

3DC depends on CPU a lot also, what's your CPU spec now Kay?

I have Q9400@3.2G + 9800GT at home, and the performance(with CUDA) is way better than

my E8400@3.6G + HD3870 at office.

akira.

[AbnRanger]

Hm, really!?

Forgive me for being skeptical, but do you have a screenshot of you sculpting at such an out of this world resolution? I mean... in blender you can only sculpt to about 4 million. So 50 million looks like a lot to me. Or maybe Andrew can comment on how exactly 3dCoat scales?

But yeah that's really great if it's really that way. I'm sorry if I sound skeptical about it so far. And as I've said, If I sculpt to about 9 million on my 8800GT I begin to get uncomfortable lag. Not too much but to the point where there is a .2 second delay on somewhat finer movements of the pen. Generally the higher the resolution the finer the detail so... And at 11 Million I no longer can move the pen with precision while operating on voxels.

But yeah, if 3dCoat scales that well then I probably will get an upgrade. In fact I've already got a vid card from newegg in my checkout menu. Just waiting on a little more confirmation and as I've said if you've got a screenshot that would be some pretty good confirmation in my book. I just want to witness this high of a resolution being used on a practical level. As opposed to just an extreme situation. Even if it "only" gets to 30 million, as opposed to 50, it would justify the price of a new card in my opinion.

thanks for the info!

Again, the 295 model is a dual GPU on one card. It's worth the money ONLY if you play a lot of GPU intensive games. The 2nd GPU on the card gets practically unused in content creation applications like 3DC.

Now, if Andrew thought that it (SLI/Dual GPU) could be greatly utilized (double CUDA capacity?) and made it work, then maybe that's another distinguishing feature he can offer over the competition. I don't know.

But for now, it's a waste of cash. I was looking to do the same, and could never find evidence that SLI/Multi-GPU's benefits these kinds of applications.

The GTX 275 is perhaps the best sinlge GPU bang for your buck card for creative types. Gamers...ATI cards are in play, but I'm done with ATI for a while. I've got a HD 4850 sitting on the shelf, gathering dust cause it's drivers don't cooperate with Combustion.

Oh, and while I'm at it. Instead of a $600 card, maybe a $300 one and buying a Western Digital Raptor Hard Drive (10,000RPM), and using it for a scratch disk/page file (on one partition, and media files on the other).

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822136322

[LJB]

My initial bench was a little inaccurate i have since pushed the visable workable count to 39million. Its the math involved when increasing the voxel resolution that makes it hard to bench it was a size versus increase problem last time from 22mil the next increase took it way beyond anything capable of working with. Using the devil work i am doing an increase each of the vox tree layers 39 nillion is the max i have been able to achieve and I get a workablee frame rate when rotatiing the work of 22fps is there a way to get something like a bounding volume mode when rotating, I can still work fluidly with voxels at this resolution its just the navigation that seems the problem. A bounding volume indication when navigatiing would make even higher resolution workable here.

[kay_Eva]

3DC depends on CPU a lot also, what's your CPU spec now Kay?

I have Q9400@3.2G + 9800GT at home, and the performance(with CUDA) is way better than

my E8400@3.6G + HD3870 at office.

akira.

I have a Q6600 2.4Ghz, I've read the I7 is too much better than that. It might be that CUDA makes the difference in performance on your machines?

Again, the 295 model is a dual GPU on one card. It's worth the money ONLY if you play a lot of GPU intensive games. The 2nd GPU on the card gets practically unused in content creation applications like 3DC.

Now, if Andrew thought that it (SLI/Dual GPU) could be greatly utilized (double CUDA capacity?) and made it work, then maybe that's another distinguishing feature he can offer over the competition. I don't know.

But for now, it's a waste of cash. I was looking to do the same, and could never find evidence that SLI/Multi-GPU's benefits these kinds of applications.

The GTX 275 is perhaps the best sinlge GPU bang for your buck card for creative types. Gamers...ATI cards are in play, but I'm done with ATI for a while. I've got a HD 4850 sitting on the shelf, gathering dust cause it's drivers don't cooperate with Combustion.

Oh, and while I'm at it. Instead of a $600 card, maybe a $300 one and buying a Western Digital Raptor Hard Drive (10,000RPM), and using it for a scratch disk/page file (on one partition, and media files on the other).

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822136322

I have 100GB partitian set aside specifically for 3D Coat, but I might buy another completely seperate harddrive for it. I'll look into benchmarks for these fast harddrives.

My initial bench was a little inaccurate i have since pushed the visable workable count to 39million. Its the math involved when increasing the voxel resolution that makes it hard to bench it was a size versus increase problem last time from 22mil the next increase took it way beyond anything capable of working with. Using the devil work i am doing an increase each of the vox tree layers 39 nillion is the max i have been able to achieve and I get a workablee frame rate when rotatiing the work of 22fps is there a way to get something like a bounding volume mode when rotating, I can still work fluidly with voxels at this resolution its just the navigation that seems the problem. A bounding volume indication when navigatiing would make even higher resolution workable here.

yeah that sounds good about the bounding box, and I'm getting tempted to get a 295 but I wonder if 3dCoat actually is taking advantage of both 'cards' on board or if it's only using one?

[LJB]

If your looking at a scratch disk then might i reccomend a ssd rather than a standard. Also there is no reason to one quite as large as 100gb A good quality 32 or 64 gb ssd will improve virtual mem performance no end.

[kay_Eva]

If your looking at a scratch disk then might i reccomend a ssd rather than a standard. Also there is no reason to one quite as large as 100gb A good quality 32 or 64 gb ssd will improve virtual mem performance no end.

Hm, so you're saying I should install my entire OS to this SSD or should I just use it for a swap cache? Which would be better? I think the SSD is a good idea.

This is the one I think I'll get. It costs 50% more than the 64GB counterpart and it's also got a faster write speed. So I think it's a better value. Does it look good. I don't know much abotu them I think I'll get this one. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16820231256

Here is the GPU I'm thinking about: GTX275 1.7GB (!) I wonder if that would be more helpful having all of that GPU memory because you know that even if you go with multi-GPU a program will only use the amount of RAM on each individul GPU. So this GTX275 in effect has 2x as much RAM as the GTX295. I hope Andrew will happen upton this thread and help me decide.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16814130503

And then the GTX295 alernative. Less memory, 2GPU's. Can 3d Coat take advantage of it?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16814130504

[mocaw]

I find that zbrush sits on my desktop and gets very little use. That said I don't do a lot of sculpting so the video card upgrade would be wasted on me.

I did however recently upgrade my system for roughly $500 (new AM3 MB, AMD Phenom II x4 955, nice heat sink, 8GB RAM, and Nice eighty certified PSU) and all I can say is that while voxel sculpting is roughly twice as fast as my old system, all other rendering is 5-8 times faster as are any multi-threaded simulations or other operations in applications. So for me, if I had to decide between $600 on a hardware upgrade or zbrush I'd say go with the hardware upgrade if you are hitting a wall that is more about processing power and less about application refinement/user skill.

Additionally- If you need a zbrush license, it's worth waiting for a "used" one if you can and save at least $200-300 bucks that way. Which then also buys you a new video card, which in turn runs 3DC voxels better, which in equal turn makes you then sell your copy of zbrush and recoup some or all of your money!

Sorry to keep rambling- but geothefaust's video card makes his system, which at its core is roughly 1/2 the speed of my new rig, run voxels at least eight times faster and in higher numbers than my system. That is impressive no mater how you slice it- and a far cheaper upgrade than a new MB, i7 chip, and RAM.

Personally I can live with OK sculpting, but NEED good painting on mesh tools far more often. I vote for buying the same or similar card as geothefaust OR getting one of the ones Andrew has suggested as they can be found for around $100. AFAIK it's all about the streaming cores first, then system RAM.

[kay_Eva]

I find that zbrush sits on my desktop and gets very little use. That said I don't do a lot of sculpting so the video card upgrade would be wasted on me.

I did however recently upgrade my system for roughly $500 (new AM3 MB, AMD Phenom II x4 955, nice heat sink, 8GB RAM, and Nice eighty certified PSU) and all I can say is that while voxel sculpting is roughly twice as fast as my old system, all other rendering is 5-8 times faster as are any multi-threaded simulations or other operations in applications. So for me, if I had to decide between $600 on a hardware upgrade or zbrush I'd say go with the hardware upgrade if you are hitting a wall that is more about processing power and less about application refinement/user skill.

Additionally- If you need a zbrush license, it's worth waiting for a "used" one if you can and save at least $200-300 bucks that way. Which then also buys you a new video card, which in turn runs 3DC voxels better, which in equal turn makes you then sell your copy of zbrush and recoup some or all of your money!

Sorry to keep rambling- but geothefaust's video card makes his system, which at its core is roughly 1/2 the speed of my new rig, run voxels at least eight times faster and in higher numbers than my system. That is impressive no mater how you slice it- and a far cheaper upgrade than a new MB, i7 chip, and RAM.

Personally I can live with OK sculpting, but NEED good painting on mesh tools far more often. I vote for buying the same or similar card as geothefaust OR getting one of the ones Andrew has suggested as they can be found for around $100. AFAIK it's all about the streaming cores first, then system RAM.

Okay thanks!

I've pretty much decided NOT to get that harddrive...

But hopefull somebody, hopefully Andrew, can chime in and tell me whether having all that extra RAM of the GTX 1.7GB is better than just a plain 800MB card. I really need to know. I"m going to purchase tomorrow!

(I have a couple of other things I was going to order besides 3dCoat stuff and I want them all on the same ticket!)

and maybe geo can tell me his system specs... too

[Javis]

I can get my machine to sculpt pretty well with 50million on screen. Andrew also can (he told me once before by IM) Maybe both out machines are beefy.

Anyway, you don't necessarily need to upgrade your video card. If you have something lower then an 8000 geforce series, I would say definitely upgrade. I just upgraded to the 275 recently because I had a 7600GT forever, and it was becoming very obsolete and difficult to do certain things, especially since it didn't support CUDA.

But anyway, only you can determine whether you need/want that upgrade. Goodluck with your decision.

[Javis]

Great post. Excellent advice.

I find that zbrush sits on my desktop and gets very little use. That said I don't do a lot of sculpting so the video card upgrade would be wasted on me.

I did however recently upgrade my system for roughly $500 (new AM3 MB, AMD Phenom II x4 955, nice heat sink, 8GB RAM, and Nice eighty certified PSU) and all I can say is that while voxel sculpting is roughly twice as fast as my old system, all other rendering is 5-8 times faster as are any multi-threaded simulations or other operations in applications. So for me, if I had to decide between $600 on a hardware upgrade or zbrush I'd say go with the hardware upgrade if you are hitting a wall that is more about processing power and less about application refinement/user skill.

Additionally- If you need a zbrush license, it's worth waiting for a "used" one if you can and save at least $200-300 bucks that way. Which then also buys you a new video card, which in turn runs 3DC voxels better, which in equal turn makes you then sell your copy of zbrush and recoup some or all of your money!

Sorry to keep rambling- but geothefaust's video card makes his system, which at its core is roughly 1/2 the speed of my new rig, run voxels at least eight times faster and in higher numbers than my system. That is impressive no mater how you slice it- and a far cheaper upgrade than a new MB, i7 chip, and RAM.

Personally I can live with OK sculpting, but NEED good painting on mesh tools far more often. I vote for buying the same or similar card as geothefaust OR getting one of the ones Andrew has suggested as they can be found for around $100. AFAIK it's all about the streaming cores first, then system RAM.

[kay_Eva]

Andrew just replied to me by PM and he's says, multi-GPU will not help, and more GPU memoery is better! So I'll get that same card that geo has!! Also, he says because I have 8GB Ram that harddrive upgrade will probably not effect me so no harddrive. In case anyone was wondering. Whoooo. I'm so glad I got that out of the way. Thanks everyone.

Getting the GTX275 1.7GB!!

[AbnRanger]

If your looking at a scratch disk then might i reccomend a ssd rather than a standard. Also there is no reason to one quite as large as 100gb A good quality 32 or 64 gb ssd will improve virtual mem performance no end.

I don't know how much video editing or compositing you do, but if a fair amount, consider a really small (30GB) solid state (you have to shop carefully...some of the older generation controllers don't have any quicker seek times than a standard disc HD...the newer ones have a good amount of cache) for your Page File/Scratch Disk, and then a Raptor HD (or even faster 2 in a RAID 0 config) for your media material (content that you will be using...video files, textures, etc.). Instead of your regular HD getting bottlenecked with multiple calls, and only one spindle to access that data at a time, you can see how "spreading the load" across different HD's can help a good deal. OS, Applications, and storage on you main HD...a page disk completely separate, and a separate Raptor or Raid for quick media content access. If you don't do much compositing or video editing, you can skip the last one...but even Adobe Premiere's own manual suggests a separate RAID for such content.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16820227460

[LJB]

I don't know how much video editing or compositing you do, but if a fair amount, consider a really small (30GB) solid state (you have to shop carefully...some of the older generation controllers don't have any quicker seek times than a standard disc HD...the newer ones have a good amount of cache) for your Page File/Scratch Disk, and then a Raptor HD (or even faster 2 in a RAID 0 config) for your media material (content that you will be using...video files, textures, etc.). Instead of your regular HD getting bottlenecked with multiple calls, and only one spindle to access that data at a time, you can see how "spreading the load" across different HD's can help a good deal. OS, Applications, and storage on you main HD...a page disk completely separate, and a separate Raptor or Raid for quick media content access. If you don't do much compositing or video editing, you can skip the last one...but even Adobe Premiere's own manual suggests a separate RAID for such content.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16820227460

Exactly

[mocaw]

I'm always amazed at how many people have one drive! It's risky AND can present a bottleneck depending on what you're doing.

In addition- running one drive all the time AFAIK produces more heat, and if you're like me and don't have a bunch of 120mm fans going nor air conditioning this can be an important factor when your system is at full load and you're trying to render with two of your four cores, and then run AE with the other two at the same time!

Spicy HOT!!!

Throw a beefy video card like that 275 in the mix...well you might want to consider getting some rear slat vents or a higher CMF exhaust fan too with your newegg order! Just a thought if your system is already ridding high on load...

[WillBellJr]

That's definitely true, you should always consider your existing power supply when considering a GPU upgrade as well.

With an over taxed power supply, your system may seem fine until 6 minutes into a render and then it crashes leaving you scratching your head as to what's wrong...

As far as drive speed, having done lots of video editing in my day, all of my desktop systems have had a 2-drive RAID 0 setup which I typically assign as the [F:] (Fast) drive.

I can't see spending more for a >7200 rpm drive w/lesser capacity than what's currently available.

I've never had any of my RAID 0 setups fail on me either - as long as you keep your drives dust free and well cooled/ventilated, they're usually good for the fashionable life of the drive. (I need to upgrade my two 160 gig'ers to 500g or 1tb! 160-gig drives were in fashion when I put that RAID together...)

I was going to get a GTX285 w/2gigs but decided to wait for a bit for a newer card but since I do most of my gaming now on the XBox, I don't really need the hottest card for gaming, especially if it's not going to do much for my graphics apps.

I might just get that '285 for now and be done with it...

-Will

[AbnRanger]

That's definitely true, you should always consider your existing power supply when considering a GPU upgrade as well.

With an over taxed power supply, your system may seem fine until 6 minutes into a render and then it crashes leaving you scratching your head as to what's wrong...

As far as drive speed, having done lots of video editing in my day, all of my desktop systems have had a 2-drive RAID 0 setup which I typically assign as the [F:] (Fast) drive.

I can't see spending more for a >7200 rpm drive w/lesser capacity than what's currently available.

I've never had any of my RAID 0 setups fail on me either - as long as you keep your drives dust free and well cooled/ventilated, they're usually good for the fashionable life of the drive. (I need to upgrade my two 160 gig'ers to 500g or 1tb! 160-gig drives were in fashion when I put that RAID together...)

I was going to get a GTX285 w/2gigs but decided to wait for a bit for a newer card but since I do most of my gaming now on the XBox, I don't really need the hottest card for gaming, especially if it's not going to do much for my graphics apps.

I might just get that '285 for now and be done with it...

-Will

A RAID setup with two Raptors (10,000 RPM's) are substantially faster than the same config with two 7200 RPM HD's. If you want storage capacity, that's what external HD's are good for.

[kay_Eva]

Well... the final verdict is in. I'm not sure whether my Q6600 2.4 is bottlenecking performance or not but my 3d Coat performance only increased by about 15%. In other words it doesn't really even give me an extra level of subdivision/resolution, however the one that I was using anyway which is right at 11million is a little bit snappier. Also some of the baking processes *seem* a little quicker.

However, I still feel OK about spending the money on the card as my performance in game engines has in some cases doubled and tripled. So it's not a loss. Just didn't see the improvement in 3d Coat that I would have liked.

[erikals]

it must be a CPU or Ram issue then...

please tell if you find out more...

[toglia]

Well... the final verdict is in. I'm not sure whether my Q6600 2.4 is bottlenecking performance or not but my 3d Coat performance only increased by about 15%. In other words it doesn't really even give me an extra level of subdivision/resolution, however the one that I was using anyway which is right at 11million is a little bit snappier. Also some of the baking processes *seem* a little quicker.

However, I still feel OK about spending the money on the card as my performance in game engines has in some cases doubled and tripled. So it's not a loss. Just didn't see the improvement in 3d Coat that I would have liked.

Sad to here, my evga 275 gtx arrived today and I have the Q6600 too, but I´m upgrading from a 8500 so I hope to see a good change.

I will post my results when my new power supply arrives .

So basically nobody know what really boosts performance of 3dc. Some say multi core cpu make a huge difference, others don´t know if 3dc is even multithreaded, others ram, others multiprocessors of video cards?

Has nvidia´s performance statistics arrived?

[Klaus Nordby]

I use one 30 Gb Vertex SSD drive as my Win7 x64 OS drive and another 30 Gb Vertex as my applications drive. That makes for VERY speedy, snappy operations, as the OS and the apps don't compete for drive bandwidth. For instance, *every* Adobe CS4 app starts in 2-3 seconds. For cheap mass storage I use old-fashioned hard drives, natch -- you can get 1 Tb drives for a song and a dance. Anyone who does any serious, pro-level graphics owes it to himself to get SSD drives, they're simply wonderful! Small, silent, cold, fast -- what's not to like?