Q: What is the most appropriate video card for modern 3D solid modelling?

  • Thread starter Thread starter RM
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R

RM

What is the most appropriate video card for solid modeling?
I understand that the ATI FireGL line is targeted for OpenGL (i.e., Vector
graphics) environments, and the 9800pro is targeted at DirectX (i.e. texture
mapping) environments. But solid modeling appears to incorporate both. Given
that a low end FireGL board is about the same $ as a 9800pro, which gives
the best bang for the buck? The software of interest is CATIA v5 and
Solidworks, etc.

Thanks.
RM.
 
Solidworks gave all of those cards a crappy rating.
I'm running SW in my CAD labs on a Gigabyte mobo
... the 533 series ... with an integrated video card.
8 video ram / 128 meg system ram used when needed.
Solidworks runs fine. I've seen SW run on an ATI
9600XT, and I don't see any real gain in anything at
all. I've dl'd a bunch of the posted projects from the
Solidworks web site, and all of them run fine on my
systems. I certainly would not go put big money into
video cards just to run Engineering Graphics projects.
They are just not there yet .. maybe someday. I think
this is a bad habit in the Engineering community .. of
overstating their case. Researchers here go out and
buy dual Xeons at a whopping price because somebody
at a company said that their software needed the big
guns. A dual Xeon can out perform my little Gigabyte
boards by about 25 percent ... and that is with maybe
a half-million variables in their equations. Otherwise,
these $600 computers run dead even with the Xeons.
Believe me when I tell you the Gamers are the only
ones who need this power right now ... and we could
use more :-)

johns
 
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