FireGLs and 3DLabs crushing Quadros

[AnnoyedGrunt]

Well, in the past I have had much better luck with NV than with 3DLabs, and given ATI's mediocre OpenGL drivers, I would not be as trusting of their stability.

However, it certainly looks like NV has WAY overpriced their cards, considering you get almost the same gaming card for $400 (6800GT) as the $1700 workstation version (Quadro 3400). I really hope ATI's drivers are stable, because NV really needs some good competition so they will bring their prices down to a resonable level.

Also, you see that in many situations, the cards are very heavily CPU limited (well, looking @ the THG review) so there is not much of a point in a faster card if you are running those programs.

-D'oh!

 

[imported_TheCadMan]

Has anyone actually used NV's SLI on the quadro series? How do you know it's better? Is it compatible? Is it a certified configuration? There are too many questions to say it's better. For the same price you can buy the 3DLabs Realizm 800 as the 3400 SLI.

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: Drayvn

Originally posted by: SickBeast

Originally posted by: Drayvn
What the guy said above, i dont think SLI will do anything in terms of CAD stuff and CGI stuff really.

SLI is about performance, and u wouldnt need it in this working world, only gaming.

As someone who uses these OpenGL cards professionally, there *is* indeed a great use for SLI. Any graphics card eventually "hits the wall" when you are modelling in 3D Max/AutoCAD. By that I mean once you hit a certain polygon count and level of complexity, your graphics card chokes and the program becomes a slideshow. For people doing large scale commercial work or highly detailed scenes, SLI is a Godsend.

The new ATi cards look like an excellent value, but I continue to view their drivers with a great deal of skepticism. The reason they are able to sell the cards so cheap likely lies in the fact that the X800 architecture is very similar to R300; the driver production was probably very simple.

I'm just going to wait until my next large project crops up and I'll buy whatever is best for my situation. I don't think I'd use anything but nVidia though, unless ATi can pull a rabbit out of it's driver hat.

Oh ok, maybe so, i just dont feel that they need 1 card to render 50% of the workload while the other does the rest, it to me doesnt seem useful, but again, thats just my opinion, i see SLI working better in the gaming world really, but on the more budget orientated ppl.

You don't seem to understand the point or the use of these workstation graphics cards. When an image is rendered in any of these programs, the CPU does 100% of the work. The graphics card is solely used to reproduce a "dumbed down" version of the final output in real-time to allow the user to make changes to the 3D scene. In essence, your scene in 3D Max is a 3D game that your graphics card is rendering in real-time. When you want to generate your final stunning image, the CPU is the component generating the JPEG file, not the graphics card.

The bottom line is that you need a massively powerful graphics card to work on complicated projects. The real-time manipulation of the model requires a single powerful computer; the workload cannot be spread across multiple machines. The scenario you're probably thinking of is what's known as a "render farm". Render farm computers only require processing power though, and often do not even have a graphics card or monitor attached to them. They are very similar to web servers.

 

[Keysplayr]

Originally posted by: TheCadMan
Has anyone actually used NV's SLI on the quadro series? How do you know it's better? Is it compatible? Is it a certified configuration? There are too many questions to say it's better. For the same price you can buy the 3DLabs Realizm 800 as the 3400 SLI.

The cost for a productive workstation is generally not even a thought for a corporation/company who depends on them for income. If you are a small company and are pinching pennies, then one Nvidia Quadro will do just fine. So with cost not a factor, There isn't a CAD designer out there who wouldn't want an quadro SLI setup, except you. Just trying to figure out your agenda here and why you aren't seeing the obvious. You didn't already purchase an ATI card for your CAD workstation did you? If so, I could then "maybe" see why your touting it so much. Because you own one. If CAD apps used DX9, you would then have a better argument. But even if it was DX9, there still would be quadro SLI to clean house.
It's really self explanitory.

 

[Genx87]

Sickbeast: I have heard people on beyond3ds forums talk about possibly offloading the final render to the GPUs in the future or it may even be possible now. Is this something that you have heard about or know is in the works?

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: Genx87
Sickbeast: I have heard people on beyond3ds forums talk about possibly offloading the final render to the GPUs in the future or it may even be possible now. Is this something that you have heard about or know is in the works?

It may indeed be possible now, but not in 3D Studio Max. My final renderings need to be in 8MP or greater resolution, and I don't think that the current graphics cards are capable of such a high resolution. On top of that, it takes my Athlon XP Mobile at 2500mhz around 4 hours to generate a single rendering for some of my projects. I don't see a graphics card being able to do that type of work in realtime, even if it's only 1FPS. A top end SLI setup probably couldn't even do 1FPM (frame per minute).

The realtime images in 3D Max do not even come close to comparing with the final rendered output. I'm sure things will improve in the near future to the point that the realtime image will be very close if not identical to the CPU-generated output, but again it will be at lower resolutions like 1600x1200.

As far as programming the GPU to help generate the JPEG files goes, I haven't heard anything and I would be very surprised if they could pull this off.

 

[Genx87]

Heh, well even if you could get 1 FPM that is what, a small fraction of time compared to how long it takes now

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: Genx87
Heh, well even if you could get 1 FPM that is what, a small fraction of time compared to how long it takes now

Yes this is true, and putting 300 million transistors to use on top of the 100 million inside the CPU could theoretically cut rendering times by 75%. You still wouldn't get 1FPM; it would probably be more like 1FPH (frame per hour).

 

[batmanuel]

Originally posted by: SickBeast

Originally posted by: Genx87
Sickbeast: I have heard people on beyond3ds forums talk about possibly offloading the final render to the GPUs in the future or it may even be possible now. Is this something that you have heard about or know is in the works?

It may indeed be possible now, but not in 3D Studio Max. My final renderings need to be in 8MP or greater resolution, and I don't think that the current graphics cards are capable of such a high resolution. On top of that, it takes my Athlon XP Mobile at 2500mhz around 4 hours to generate a single rendering for some of my projects. I don't see a graphics card being able to do that type of work in realtime, even if it's only 1FPS. A top end SLI setup probably couldn't even do 1FPM (frame per minute).

The realtime images in 3D Max do not even come close to comparing with the final rendered output. I'm sure things will improve in the near future to the point that the realtime image will be very close if not identical to the CPU-generated output, but again it will be at lower resolutions like 1600x1200.

As far as programming the GPU to help generate the JPEG files goes, I haven't heard anything and I would be very surprised if they could pull this off.

Gelato. Only works in Maya for Linux right now, though. I'd say you probably wind up trading some of the more advanced shaders (caustics and radiosity, for example) for rendering speed, so you might not get the kind of photorealism with this that you'd get with a really good software renderer like Renderman.

With the highly programmable texturing and shading units on the DX8 and DX9 cards, you'll likely see more of this kind of stuff from ATi and 3D Labs. If this tech leads to the kind of performance jump we saw when gaming moved from CPU-based rendering to using video cards that did their own T&L, it could make a huge difference.

 

[imported_TheCadMan]

Here's a poll: How many here have a professional graphics card that they bought with their own money(your work did not buy it, you did) Why did you select this card?

 

[batmanuel]

Originally posted by: TheCadMan
Here's a poll: How many here have a professional graphics card that they bought with their own money(your work did not buy it, you did) Why did you select this card?

I've actually got a refurb'd FireGL 8800 that I bought at CompGeeks for $90. I wanted a real pro OGL card for some Maya and 3ds MAX projects I'm playing around with in my spare time, but I didn't want to spend a huge amount of money, so I settled for this model.

Actually, it is not all that bad for gaming. I've got some issues, but the Doom 3 demo actually runs smooth enough to be quite playable at 1024x768 even with specular lighting, shadows and high quality effects turned on (no antialiasing though). I wonder if the OpenGL optimizations in the drivers give it a bit of a boost compared to a normal Radeon 8500?

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: TheCadMan
Here's a poll: How many here have a professional graphics card that they bought with their own money(your work did not buy it, you did) Why did you select this card?

I've got a FireGL X1. In reality it's a 9700Pro, and I selected it because I knew the mod was possible, plus it was the greatest graphics card created in recent memory. It only cost me $200US shipped a year and a half ago.

 

[Dubb]

I have firegl T2 in my Thinkpad, awesome card for a laptop. got it mainly for rhino and maya work when I'm in studio (desktops aren't that practical at my school). Would have prefered a quadro go based on the numbers, but I wanted an IBM (reliability, durability, all around well done everything)

also put together a desktop workstation on the cheap - low voltage xeon hot deal (running at 2.6) + softquadro'ed 5900 ultra @ Fx3000

fingers crossed for an eventual 6800> quadro mod...

If I weren't a poor student, wildcat 800, no doubt