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Trump Card for 3DS Max Users

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PCQ Bureau
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In May this year we did a graphics card shootout, where we compared the performance of 50 gaming graphics cards for running latest 3D games. But games are not the only thing that people require a graphics card for. Typically, graphics professionals, those working on, say 3DStudio Max, Maya, SolidWorks, Pro/Engineer, use professional graphics cards, such as Quadro and FireGL from NVIDIA and ATI, respectively. But, we thought of checking out the performance of gaming cards for running professional graphics applications and see if they provided any benefit to graphics professionals. 



We picked up six PCI-Express cards, from the fifty we'd reviewed in May, three each from ATI and NVIDIA, representing their different card categories and tested them out to run 3DS Max 6. These cards were based on ATI's Radeon X300, X600, X800 and NVIDIA's GeForce 6200, 6600 and 6800 GPUs. We used SPECapc benchmark for 3DS Max 6 from Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (spec) for testing the performance of these cards for running 3DS Max. 

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Direct

Hit!

Applies to: 3DS Max users

USP: Cards that give the best of both gaming and professional applications 

Primary Link: www.ati.com,

www.nvidia.com,  www4.discreet.com/3dsmax/ 

Google keywords: OpenGL, spec 

The benchmark comprised of forty tests for testing Wireframe Graphics, Shaded Graphics, Graphics/Texturing/ Lighting/Blending, Inverse Kinematics, Object Creation/Editing/Manipulation, Scene Creation Manipulation and Rendering performance of a card in 3DS Max. Except from rendering, all other activities are interactive in nature. The benchmark executes these activities on sample files using scripts, though. The benchmark measures the time to execute the tests and the less time a card takes the better it is. Apart from timing the test runs, the benchmark also creates a relative reference ratio for each test for every card with reference to some another card. After that a geometric mean of all tests of a particular kind is calculated to get a ratio for each category of tests. 

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Finally, we have a score for rendering and interactive tests, which gives the final composite score for all tests. For comparison, we have an ATI FireGL V3200 professional graphics card. While we used the regular drivers, provided by the manufacturers, for the gaming cards, the FireGL card was tested using the special 3DS Max drivers, which are provided for the professional cards only. We took the performance of Intel's on-board graphics solution, 915G as the reference score. The machine used had an MSI 915G-based motherboard, P4 3.4GHz and 1GB of DDR2 RAM. 3DS Max 6 can work on both DirectX and OpenGL graphics

libraries, however only one at time, but we tested the cards' performance on OpenGL only.

ATI FireGL V3200 professional graphics card

The gaming card looks similar to the professional card, but the similarities end there only

Coming to the results, as expected, the FireGL card outperformed all other cards by leaps and bounds, despite it being at the low-end of the professional graphics card spectrum. Of course, performance of the high-end professional cards will be even better. So for professional applications, the best bet for a user is a professional graphics card, such as the FireGL. However, there was one surprise here, before the tests we had anticipated that a better card would give us better rendering performance but as can be seen from the results there is no difference in rendering performance across all cards; the difference has come only in interactive tests. Out of the gaming cards, ATI cards, in general, performed better than the NVIDIA cards, with the ATI X800 and X600 significantly better than the on-board solution. So, if you don't have the budget to buy a professional graphics card or want a card which can give you good gaming experience along with decent professional application performance, you know which cards to go for. 

Anoop Mangla

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