Updates from joe RenderStream recently assisted Jeff Mottle over at http://www.cgarchitect.com on one of the most comprehensive graphics card reviews geared specifically for the CG industry. Jeff reviewed the top graphics cards from NVIDIA and ATI and evaluated their performance in the top apps in our industry as well as how professional series cards stack up against consumer cards.
This graph from the article is showing the ranking for a couple of 3DSMax / MR tests where shorter bars are better.
“Anyone who has worked in this industry for any length of time has at one point found themselves specifying a video card for their rendering workstation. The seemingly endless lineup of models and often cryptic specifications make selecting the best card a daunting task. Most rely upon product reviews from the gaming industry and/or whatever their budget will allow. Neither however provide the insight required to properly choose a card in the visualization field. The purpose of this review is to evaluate some of the latest cards in the industry in the context of viewport performance for architectural visualization professionals…”
You can read the full review here: http://www.cgarchitect.com/news/Reviews/Review076_1.asp
It should be noted that the tests focused on viewport performance. How well each card would perform in a GPU rendering application was not evaluated due to the early state of that technology. Once GPU rendering matures further we plan to do another review and include GPU rendering in the performance evaluations and well as evaluate the recently released GPUs
Looking ahead:
After attending this year’s SIGGRAPH event is Los Angeles, it is quite obvious that the next year is going to be very exciting for the CG industry. This is thanks in no small part to the advances we will see in GPU rendering and server side 3D applications that are driven by the GPU.
NVIDIA just announced their latest line of quadro GPUs that are up to 5X faster than the previous generation of FX cards.
“The newest NVIDIA® Quadro® professional solutions are true technological breakthroughs, delivering up to 5x faster performance across a broad range of design, animation and video applications. Built on the innovative NVIDIA Fermi architecture, the latest Quadro offerings are the first professional-class GPUs to integrate high performance computing capabilities with advanced visualization techniques. Featuring new Scalable Geometry Engine™ technology, Quadro can deliver an unheard of 1.3 billion triangles per second, shattering previous 3D graphics limitations. With Quadro solutions, your work flows — you can design, iterate and deliver higher quality projects in less time.” – http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro-fermi-overview.html
The Specs for the new Quadro line are as follows:
Quadro 4000: 2 GB RAM, 256 CUDA Cores
Quadro 5000: 2.5 GB RAM, 352 CUDA Cores
Quadro 6000: 6 GB RAM, 448 CUDA Cores
These are all big memory cards but remember GPU accelerated renderers will need the memory to gain the most benefit. We look forward to getting our hands on these cards and bringing you some more useful perfromance data. Stay tuned!
