Member ironman13 Posted October 31, 2010 Member Report Share Posted October 31, 2010 Hi there, I was wondering what Kind of changes I could expect to see If I buy an nvidia card and use Cuda. Most Importantly will I have more responsiveness when filling and smoothing at high resolutions? Thanks In advance. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor AbnRanger Posted October 31, 2010 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted October 31, 2010 Hi there, I was wondering what Kind of changes I could expect to see If I buy an nvidia card and use Cuda. Most Importantly will I have more responsiveness when filling and smoothing at high resolutions? Thanks In advance. http://www.3d-coat.com/wiki/index.php/12.1_CUDA_BasicsIt is largely dependent upon the number of processing cores the card has and the memory bandwith, but the GTX 260 and newer would likely yield a very noticeable improvement overall. Just going from the GTS 250 (pretty much a repackaged 9800 GTX) to a 275 was very noticeable (it has double the processing cores), for me. So, I would seriously consider a 465 or better, if it's within your budget. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member ironman13 Posted October 31, 2010 Author Member Report Share Posted October 31, 2010 http://www.3d-coat.com/wiki/index.php/12.1_CUDA_Basics It is largely dependent upon the number of processing cores the card has and the memory bandwith, but the GTX 260 and newer would likely yield a very noticeable improvement overall. Just going from the GTS 250 (pretty much a repackaged 9800 GTX) to a 275 was very noticeable (it has double the processing cores), for me. So, I would seriously consider a 465 or better, if it's within your budget. Thank you very much for the reply. I am running ATI 5770 right now. I am becoming very fond of 3d coat and want to do more hard edged modeling in it. I have a decent system. nothing fancy, a 6 core with gigs of ram. When watching some of the tutorial videos it appeared to me as if people were able to sculpt at higher resolutions than I currently can. Just to be clear. I will certainly notice a difference in the fill and smoothing with an nvidia card then? I'm looking at getting a GTX 470 (Fermi) I hate to spend the money since my current card is only a few months old but I make my living with 3d so I need the best tools. Thanks so much for helping me out. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor AbnRanger Posted October 31, 2010 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted October 31, 2010 Thank you very much for the reply. I am running ATI 5770 right now. I am becoming very fond of 3d coat and want to do more hard edged modeling in it. I have a decent system. nothing fancy, a 6 core with gigs of ram. When watching some of the tutorial videos it appeared to me as if people were able to sculpt at higher resolutions than I currently can. Just to be clear. I will certainly notice a difference in the fill and smoothing with an nvidia card then? I'm looking at getting a GTX 470 (Fermi) I hate to spend the money since my current card is only a few months old but I make my living with 3d so I need the best tools. Thanks so much for helping me out. I'm not certain exactly which brushes get the biggest bump in performance, but it's been my understanding from Andrew's past comments that all Voxel (Volume mode) tools are CUDA accelerated, except the Surface mode. I may be wrong, but I thought I heard Andrew state that Surface mode isn't CUDA accelerated....just volume mode. He did state that the biggest benefit when using a CUDA enabled card is when using materials or masks with large brush radius'. As far as the Fill tool and Smoothing, specifically, perhaps Andrew could address that question more directly. He is currently working on re-building the brush engine in 3DC and said he wouldn't be very active in the forums for a few days. So, I'm just passing on what I know in the mean time. If you use 3ds Max, you'll soon get a big benefit from having a CUDA enabled card, as 2012 is going to have iRay and PhysX integrated...both are GPU accelerated. Personally, I think Maya and perhaps Softimage will get iRay as well. The reason being is that Nvidia stated that iRay is included with Mental Ray licenses for their software vendors (Autodesk). This was last year. It wasn't released in time to make by 3ds Max's cutoff for new features integration in 2011. Sure enough the subscription customers got it recently in their extension pack. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member Rich_Art Posted October 31, 2010 Advanced Member Report Share Posted October 31, 2010 Nvidia is great indeed but the noise and heat are not so great. I'm still unsure which card I'll buy. A Nvidia 470 or an Ati Radeon 6870. For 3DCoat the Nvidia is the choice to go for but my main application is Cinema4D and that runs fine with Ati. Cinema4D does not support cuda.... Peace, Rich_Art. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Contributor BeatKitano Posted October 31, 2010 Contributor Report Share Posted October 31, 2010 Rich_art, don't make that mistake, because one app doesn't support cuda you're going with the underperforming card in cg apps ? If you were just a player I would say go for it, but since you've interest in cg creation, why bother with buggy hardware/drivers ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member Rich_Art Posted October 31, 2010 Advanced Member Report Share Posted October 31, 2010 LoL, yeah I know about the buggy ati drivers indeed. on the CGTalk Cinema4D forum there are multiple topics on the buggy ati drivers. For 99% I've made a decision to buy the Nvidia 470 card. 1% keeps me from buying at the moment. Although I read more and more about the driver problems with the ati, so my guess is that I'll buy the Nvidia any time soon. Thanks.. Peace, Rich_Art. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Contributor BeatKitano Posted October 31, 2010 Contributor Report Share Posted October 31, 2010 To be perfectly honest, both brand work, but in my experience, and in professional surrounding, ati gets lots of quirks around cg apps. May be ok for games, but for 3d art it's certainly not the wisest choice (though some don't have those problems I know, but I'm taking about numbers here, and numbers don't lie) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member Rich_Art Posted October 31, 2010 Advanced Member Report Share Posted October 31, 2010 I now have an Ati 7900GTX and never encountered any problems with the ati drivers. I guess I was lucky. Any way, thanks and I'll think it over and make my decision at the end of this week. Peace, Rich_Art. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor AbnRanger Posted October 31, 2010 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted October 31, 2010 Nvidia cards aren't necessarily any louder than ATI's...that is not an issue when you buy a card that comes with aftermarket cooling straight from the factory (usually has heatpipes and twin fans). MSI, ASUS, Galaxy and Palit are often brands that do just that and factory overclock it. I bought a Galaxy 275GTX and have it heavily manually overclocked....and it's quite as a kitten. That would not be the case if it were a card with the standard reference cooling (plastic box with one small fan). I was a big ATI guy until I bought that 4850. I couldn't even use my compositing app, Combustion, with it...no matter what I did. I waited through several driver updates and nothing. Went out and bought an NVidia card, and it worked perfectly. I later upgraded from the 250 GTS to the 275 and have nothing but a great experience with NVidia cards. Reference models: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814500157 Modified After market cooling models: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814261073 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127513 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Dreamcube017 Posted November 1, 2010 Member Report Share Posted November 1, 2010 I too have an NVIDIA GTX 260 and want to upgrade, but For now this card works great aside from the odd meory erros in 3DC that I get... although I'm pretty sure those are due more to human error than anything else. :P I have an ATI card in my laptop and haven't had much problems with it, but in my experience with other 3D software, NVIDIA seems to have slightly better cards. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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