Graphics Card Advice

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runtimDLL

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Hi guys,

Quick 1..i work in an Architectural firm and ive been given the task of speccing new pc's.
ive managed to put together some good i7s, however im a bit undecided about the graphics cards.

Basically, theres 2 options:

GTX 660 2GB vs Quadro FX 580 512mb

both come in at around the 3k mark

i know for a fact that the 660 will handle everything thrown at it in this firm even LUMION albeit at decreased performance

does anyone have any experience or knowledge on the technology behind lumion and whether the quadros 512mb vram will limit the performance even though it spreads the workload over multiple cores?

Thanks in advance.
 
I game on the GTX 660 2gb oc version and it's an excellent card.
I'd think the Quadro would be more suitable for your situation though as it is more suited for the intensive line work required.

I work on a Quadro fx 4600 at work on Catia & Autodesk products.
 
it seems to run lumion, u need a gaming card..the vram limits the possibility of high res renders

ive just done a bit more research now and found this.

Title: Lumion Team, I need a Specs check
Post by: maikoo25 on May 23, 2013, 05:09:25 pm
Hi, my name is Miguel. I work for PBK architects and we are considering buying your software. We currently have two sets of different computers.
The old ones are:
Windows 7
Intel core quad CPU Q9300
2.5 GHz
RAM: 8 GB
64-bit
graphics card: NVIDIA quadro FX 1700

The new ones:
Windows 7
Intel Xeon CPU E5-2603
3.5 GHz
RAM: 16 GB
graphics card: NVIDIA quadro 600

I installed Lumion free on one of the old computers and it could BARELY run it. it was way too laggy and when i tried to export a photo the graphics card crashed and i had to reboot the computer. We are considering buying a set of graphics cards to be able to run the program smoothly but we would like to know if they are going to work well with the computers that we have.
We are looking at the "GeForce GTX 660 Ti" and the "GeForce GTF 480", we would install them on the new computers as we expect them to perform a lot better. So my question is, do you think with those graphics cards we would be able to run your program smoothly?
We usually deal with models from sketchup and revit, and they may be somewhat heavy sometimes. We would like to be able to save animations and to just fly over the models in real time so that the client can choose where to look from.

Title: Re: Lumion Team, I need a Specs check
Post by: peterm on May 24, 2013, 03:37:28 am
Quote from: maikoo25 on May 23, 2013, 05:09:25 pm
So my question is, do you think with those graphics cards we would be able to run your program smoothly?


Hi maikoo25

Please refer to the guide on hardware for Lumion. LUMION 3: Minimum hardware requirements (http://lumion3d.com/forum/f-a-q/lumion-2-minimum-hardware-requirements/).

The Passmark: Videocard Benchmarks (http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html) web site provides the guide as to performance of GPU's.

As you would appreciate, we are not able to provide definitive recommendations about running Lumion with your different scenes.

The complexity of scenes, referred to in minimum requirements is important to take note of.

Quadro cards that you currently use are not supported for Lumion, although some users do use them and get by OK. It depends on the actual scene requirements.

GTX cards (or equally performing Radeons) provide the best GPU platform. Apart from the number of cores in the card, the more VRAM there is the better, as this allows for more or higher resolution textures.

In regard the 660Ti, it has a Passmark of 4663 and that is sufficiently above the passmark score guide for moderately complex scenes.

The GTX? 480 is still near top of the Passmark list at 4306, and I see there are still plenty available on eBay etc, however they only have 1 or 1.5GB and are now 'old' in regard support for real-time shaders.

Budgets are always a constraint, but sometimes it is worth spending some marginal extra $'s so that it helps in possible future projects. You may find that the 680 that supports 4GB (some 660's do also) will be a better medium term option. Of course, NVIDIA are now in process of releasing the next generation 700 series to follow on from the Titan.

There are some cases where CPU and other hardware can cause bottlenecks for the throughput needed for the GPU Windows 7 +, definitely as 64bit, lots of RAM and a fast CPU can all help. I have an old Q6600 which is noticeably causing problems and so is being replaced soon :).

Lumion v3 is more demanding on PC's due to features such as real-time GI, Reflection Planes, 3D Clouds, etc. Your scene descriptions do not sound too heavy, but by the time you add in the entourage, and then effects and try to run that in real-time as fly-through during client presentations, then I would suggest trying to go for as much bang for your $ as possible (and then some ;) )
 
Yeah, the problem is nVidia gimp their gaming cards to be worse for production, while AMD don't.

There are ways to hack nvidia drivers though.
 
from the same website:

GPU Compute
Although I mentioned earlier in this article that we would not be evaluating the compute capabilities of these cards, if you are in the market for a new card and plan on experimenting with GPU rendering, I would be remise if I did not mention that the card with the most RAM and stream processors should be at the top of your list, this may be opposite to the selection you might make from a purely viewport performance standpoint. Once these GPU renderers are publically released we will test them further.

these worksations will be used for both the intensive linework/viewport nature as well as really intense 3D rendering using LUMION. i suppose its a matter of give and take really.
 
I don't know much about LUMION, but you stated that the program is GPU RAM dependent.

Here are a few suggestions I would make:
PowerColor AX7950 3GBD5 - 3GB RAM and 384 bit.
Sapphire R9-270X, 4Gb 256bit 4 channel DDR5 - this is sold out, but you can still ask for it and they can provide an ETA (also check other suppliers)
MSI N760 TF 2GD5/OC, 2Gb/2048mb 256bit DDR5 - I'll suggest this above your GTX 660, it's newer, less power draw, and generally a lot faster, memory bandwidth is a lot faster.

Generally if you have a normal home gaming PC, component powerdraw don't really have a big effect on the overall electricity bill, however, moving towards a company with a few PCs running these monsters can make a bump in the bill. This is where the choice between AMD and Nvidia comes into play with regards to efficiency. AMD generally offers better performance at the same price levels, but at the cost of efficiency compared to Nvidia cards. GPU technology has advanced in such a way that GPUs become more and more efficient, especially AMD cards. AMD has made a great effort to reduce their total power draw on their cards, which takes hits hard on Nvidia cards in the business world.
 
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thanks for all the suggestions and advice.. much appreciated.. will update when ive made the decision
 
Is it possible to overclock Quadro cards?

The only worry is that the FX 580 only has a small amount of CUDA cores (36) compared to my GTX 460 of 336 CUDA cores...:erm:


Oh and PS: The 600 series cards are discontinued, 700 series is available.
 
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