geforce + firegl?

[vinnypolston]

Was wondering if any of you would know if this would work, if not I'm going to give it a try...

Right now I am running a 7800GT which is fine and dandy for games but for rendering / video production ( 3ds max, avid xpress pro, photoshop... ) it doesn't always cut it, especially in 3ds max.

Was wondering if I could go buy an ATI FireGL V3300 and run it in one of my other PCI E slots and just run dual monitors. ( or quad for that matter, since each card sports 2 DVI slots and are not SLI'd / Xfire'd.. )
my mother board = EVGA 122-CK-NF63-TR.

 

[manimal]

Check around, there are ways of flashing some gaming variants to workstation capacity, I remember seeing that stuff a while ago when I last put together an AVID workstation.

 

[Lord Banshee]

if you are using 3dsmax turn on DirectX mode. 3dsmax wotk at least 4x faster in DirectX.

But also graphics cards do not help with rendering, only viewport and GUI performance. Rendering is all done in CPU and RAM.

But to answer your question, i am sure you will run into issues.. I could not get two nvidia cards to play nice together so i would not like to see what will happen with one from both parties.

If you want to be on the edgey side like me, i bought a x1950xt and i have two OS installed. WinXP 32-bit for x1950xt->FireGL mod for CAD work and Vista X1950xt for gaming. and normal everyday things.

It works pretty good, but then again since i bought the x1950xt i have not done too many 3d models, been working on electrical projects instead.

 

[lopri]

Not a good idea to mix AMD and NV cards. Don't get me wrong it can (and maybe it should) work but I wouldn't really bother to try.

 

[ViRGE]

If you're going to mix & match, you'll need to do it in XP. It doesn't work under Vista due to some WDDM restrictions.

 

[Modelworks]

I would check the drivers on the 7800gt you already have.
Photoshop should not be having any problems with the card you already have .
It doesn't use directx or opengl unless your using cs3 with the 3d import.

max is plenty fast for me with a 7600gt and I'm doing scenes with several million polys.
As someone else said you might want to make sure max is using directx viewport mode.
I use the opengl mode and haven't had issues.

The firegl card you listed would be a bad choice.
It only has 128mb ram on the card and one of the biggest things in a 3d card for viewport rendering is texture ram.

It is very easy to hit 200mb+ in textures on a scene.
The card will work but it will cause max to freeze for a second or two everytime you rotate or change views as it transfers the texture data over the bus.

 

[vinnypolston]

Thank you very much for all the input!
Yes, all of these programs work fine but it is actual rendering that is slower.
whats lagging my computer behind?

I have a Q6600 and 1GB DDR667.
only thing I can think of is my memory not being enough. maybe 2GB DDR800 would fix this problem?

or, I've heard about rendering farms, how exactly do those work? I've read somewhere that its basically a BUNCH (20ish) old PII and PIII computers farmed together...

all help is appreciated!
thanks,
-Vinny

 

[AmdInside]

I agree. If you need a workstation card, get a faster workstation card to replace your existing one. Don't mix two different vendor drivers together.