Video card issue

[Anonymous]

Hi, I am about to buy a workstation and I was wondering which video card should I choose from Nvidia Quadro FX 4600 and Nvidia Quadro 2000.

Quadro FX 4600 is a bit older but has good specs, while the Quadro 2000 is a more recent but some specs are lower than those of the previous video card.

I intend to use the workstation for 3ds Max , Revit and Artlantis renderings with Archicad imported projects.

Also what's interesting is that the FX 4600 is 2x more expensive than the quadro 2000, although the FX card is about 2-3 years older than the second one.

If anyone can help, I really would appreciate it.

Thanks

[Karl Ottenstein]

Both cards passed during Graphisoft's testing for 15:

http://www.archicadwiki.com/VideoCardsForArchiCAD15

Seems worth saving the money with the 2000 to have more money for Artlantis, etc.

Note that at present, neither ArchiCAD nor Artlantis uses OpenCL (C not G) to accelerate rendering by using the graphics card processor itself. But, more and more software will come out that does so. (On the Mac side, Final Cut Pro X and more are already taking advantage of the graphics card to speed up rendering.)

Both cards support OpenCL, for when you have apps that can use it:
http://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus

As you can see on the page above, the cheaper 2000 is twice as fast as the 4600 (for OpenCL operations).

For what its worth, I have a much cheaper ATI Radeon 5770 card and it's perfectly fine. 😉

Cheers,
Karl

[Anonymous]

I have seen quite a few people spend lots of money on high end video cards (Quadro and such) and not get much better performance (if any - it was hard to tell) than I have with much cheaper ones (Radeon and GeForce). Unless you are really sure it will be worth it I think the money is better spent elsewhere.

[Anonymous]

The better solution is to by Quadro FX-2000. With Quadro cards you got Additional drivers to speed-up 3D Studio and AutoCAD.