[kami]

Hello I posted this at the mcneel newsgroup, since I sadly got no idea on this subject. Hope somebody has any knowledge

I'm looking for a way to speed up my display performance in rhino. I'm working
on a Mac Pro with Boot Camp and Windows 7x64 and rhino5x64 wip and using
the standard graphics card at the moment:
ATI Radeon HD 5870 http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MC743 ... Tg2OTU0NTI

I found these alternatives:
NVIDIA Quadro 4000 http://store.apple.com/uk/product/H3314 ... Tk3NTgzOTk
or
NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 http://store.apple.com/uk/product/TW386 ... TE0MzgzMzQ

Does anybody know if this helps much? Are they even supported by rhino?
And I don't understand why the card with less Memory (1.5G vs 2G) costs more.

Thanks for any insights.
Christoph

[numerobis]

the Quadro 4000 is the newer model and should be faster if you compare the specs. The 4800 is overpriced

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Quadro

Quadro 4000 replaced the Quadro 3800, the replacement of the 4800 is the Quadro 5000.
http://www.nvidia.com/docs/IO/40049/LC- ... -NV-LR.pdf

but it's still "only" based on a GF100 chip (GeForce GTX 480) not the latest GF200 (GTX 5xx)

Here is some information about the performance of video cards in Rhino - but not much...
http://wiki.mcneel.com/rhino/videocards

[polynurb]

what is wrong with your hd 5870 i thought i it supposed to be quite ok with rhino?
any particular drawbacks?

for me the problem with radeon is lack of cuda.
Also there is weak or broken support for professional opengl apps like maya, houdini, solid works etc. but that is the same with geforce cards.

i ran some scenes in rhino on a friends machine (edit* was a 6970 not a 5870) and it seemed faster than the quadro 4000 that i run in my new workstation. also the quadro 4000 is out for over a year, i was hoping for an update..

anyway i needed a quadro card and use it for almost 3 month now and it has done a solid job in rhino. i do heavy texturing and it loads big resolutions very well and stable. also the overall speed is fine, i could navigate a 32M poly file with usable framerates on a 30" with 4x4 AA. I know that doesn't tell too much as it depends a lot on the scene components, but it is well faster than the fx4800 i used before!

the only crazy thing is.. if you use any 100% gpu intensive application (like octane, cuda applications etc.) you will soon fry the card as the fan is set to a very low acoustic output. and temps go over 90°! (single slot cooler for quite a chip!!)

i downloaded "precision" from evga, it works with quadro cards too, and you can define a custom response curve yourself.
just as a warning

[kami]

thanks for your messages. so the 4800 is completely useless then, good to know that.

It's not that the HD 5870 is not working. It just feels kind of slow when working on complex objects.

I was looking around a bit on that subject and found this thread:
http://news2.mcneel.com/scripts/dnewswe ... 7043&utag=
Some of my rhino models feel almost as bad as the video posted (rhino) ... That's why I'm looking for an alternative.
But I don't want to spend too much money and not have a massive speed up.

We are using different kind of graphic cards in our office. the HD 4870, HD 5870, GF 120 and I don't notice much of a speed difference between them.
The only drastic difference is, when there is a maxwell rendering running. The machines with a GF 120 are much much slower then. (At least I'm guessing that graphic card makes the difference, since the machines are almost identically)

What would be the best choice for me? Since the Quadro 4000 seems to help a lot in SolidWorks but not so much in Rhino. What's more important? Having a lot of graphics memory, or a fast processor, or ...?
If the 6970 was fast than a quadro 4000, maybe this would be a better solution? I'm working with rhino+maxwell only (+photoshop). So no other 3d programs that would benefit of any special features.

I don't know if I can acheive any massive speed up by changing my rhino settings or modelling differently. I'm using rhino5 which feels a lot faster than rhino4. Weirdly enough, my models run faster, when I model in meter scale instead of centimeters. Of course I could use extrusions instead of polysurfaces, but I got the feeling that they still are a littly buggy. Meshes (especially when joined) are much faster, but they aren't that easy to edit, so I can't use them if I expect much changes on the model.

cheers,
kami