Can anyone help me with 3D Studio Max?

[lestat]

I bought a geforce 2 hoping that it would improve my 3D Studio Max performance greatly, but so far the performance seems less than stellar. Are there any special settings I need to set within 3D Studio Max? Outside of 3D Studio Max in the Nvidia control panel? I am running Windows 2000, with the Nvidia 6.31 reference drivers installed. I have a Duron 850 on the Abit KT7 Raid. I also ran 3D Mark 2000 and my score was only 3264. This was even after I overclocked the memory on my geforce to 380!

Thanks,

Brett Fowlkes

 

[pidge]

The Geforce 2 GTS does not support UBB which will improves performance by about 30%. Plus, it would greatly help if you had more cache on your CPU or if you were running a dual CPU system. Face it. 3D Studio MAX is a workstation application and requires better hardware. Or else expect less than stellar performance.

 

[BenSkywalker]

lestat-

Which version of Max?

Which GF2?

What type of models/scenes are you working with(particularly geometric complexity)?

What are you upgrading from?

You should be seeing a rather substantial performance boost unless you are moving from a GF1/GF2MX or a WIldcat/3DLabs T&L equipped board(or fx series, you get the idea).

 

[ledzepp98]

3264 on 3dmark2000?!? sounds like you didn't install the via 4-in-1 drivers

 

[PG]

When I installed 3d studio max a while ago it asked someting about API's. The default was Heidi. I don't think the GF2 supports Heidi, but opengl was an option.

Do you guys who know 3D studio max know what I am talking about? Would it help if he re-installed and picked opengl instead of Heidi?

 

[BenSkywalker]

"Would it help if he re-installed and picked opengl instead of Heidi?"

Absolutely. You won't see any performance boost running a GF2 using Heidi, you must run OpenGL(and possibly DX8 with the upcoming release). Running Heidi you don't have any hardware T&L support, or any hardware rasterization support at all for that matter.

3DSM's OpenGL support isn't the greatest around, but it is leagues better then running Heidi, particularly with such a powerful OpenGL board in your system

 

[lestat]

Hello thanks for all the replies. While I know that I don't have a workstation capable of running Max to its full potential, from benchmarks I have seen it seems to me that maybe it would be a bit better. I went from a celeron 566 with a creative labs tnt to a Duron 850 with a geforce 2 that I bought from the For Sale/Trade forum. I have 192 megs of ram and for a while thought maybe that was holding me back, but the task manager reports that I am using only a little over that. My peformance has improved no doubt about it, but I had read about people saying great things about this card, about how it many killed professional cards. Perhaps my expectations were too high. How do you tell how many polygons you are working with? I mostly stick with landscapes. Thank you for all the replies.

Brett