alarment13

I am an independant artist am looking into building a new computer, one that can be used with alias wavefront's maya. any one know what kind of video card (make/model) i should get? how much $ should i spend? are the professional cards needed? can i change the bios on certain cards to make them into professional quality?

-Ever-

I might be completely wrong, but I think having extra RAM will make much more of a difference than having a hot gfx card when it comes to multimedia production.

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sailor

Yeah, I was also under the assumption that multimedia creation was hard on RAM and processor, not video card... Unless things are being generated real-time, the video card isnt doing anything.

Of course, I dont do any multimedia creation, so I could easily be wrong.

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Dilbert1234567

a fast card is necisary to see what you are working on befor rendering.

my radeon 9800 pro used to work great for 3dsmax r4, but it is real sluggish under r6

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-Ever-

I'd still say that buying a minimum of a gig of ram would be the first step towards any multimedia work.

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bendsley

In reality, Maya can take full advantage of video pipelining, and many other features that come on higher end cards.

If you're really looking into doing some serious Maya work, I might recommend:

Nvidia Quadro FX 4000 and 4400 (nvidia)

Wildcat Realizm 800 (3dlabs)

FireGL V7100 (ati)

The cards I listed are considered "Ultra High End", and they will run you up to around $7000.

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alarment13

Thanks everyone, yeah it does take a lot of ram as well, im thinking of getting 2 gigs of ram, but 1 gig at the least. the computers at my school have 1 gig, but some of my work is so complex that after 15 minutes of editing in wireframe, the comp starts swaping and then crashed after close to a gig has swapped.

as for video cards, I was looking at the fire gls and the quadro fx, but do not want to spend that much $ $1000 is even a lot to me. comp animation is a hobby that I would like to do more of at home, but I cant afford a $7000 dollar card. also, I heard that you can get some non professional cards, change the bios, and they will be on par with the professionals. does anyone know about this? thanks for the replys

shadowalker

not really a way to change a bios on a card made for gameing to make it a card made for GFX processing. a fire gl x3 on newegg will run you a little over 800. But without going into the Ultra high end graphic editing cards it would be your best bet.

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alarment13

If you read our Radeon 9800 SE to Radeon 9800 Pro Mod Guide, you should have known ATI's R350 and R360 cores are used in the Radeon 9800 series of graphics cards. In fact, ATI used the same cores in their FireGL X2 workstation graphics card as well!

Yes! The GPUs ATI used in their desktop graphics cards are the same GPUs they use in their FireGL series of workstation graphics cards! They only make some minor changes to the PCB of the FireGL cards. In some cases, it looks like they even use the same PCB used in the desktop cards!
ATI has been using this trick since the release of their Radeon 9500 series, which uses the R300 core. Even NVIDIA did the same thing with their GeForce series, which they turned into Quadro cards with some minor modifications on the PCB board. What this means is these workstation cards are essentially the same as their desktop counterparts.

Why did ATI and NVIDIA choose to do this? Well, as usual, it's all about the money. Designing a different GPU for workstation cards requires a lot of money. And since the market for such cards is relatively small, the cost will cut too deeply into their profits.

By using a desktop GPU in their workstation cards, the cost of workstation cards becomes virtually the same as that of desktop cards. This greatly increases their profit margin and makes workstation cards a very lucrative market. In addition, using desktop GPUs allow great flexibility when it comes to supplying a fickle market.
Now, why should anyone bother to purchase a "real" FireGL card with its premium price when it is exactly the same as the cheaper Radeon card?

Luckily, the similarity between the FireGL and Radeon cards also works to our advantage. This similarity actually allows us to mod a Radeon desktop card into a FireGL workstation-grade card!

The ATI FireGL cards are essentially identical to the Radeon cards, except their display output capabilities. Without making any actual modifications on the card, you can actually mod a Radeon into a FireGL card. The only disadvantage is the modded FireGL card will not have the additional display output capabilities found in some FireGL cards. Of course, this depends on the Radeon card you own.

taken from here
http://www.rojakpot.com/default.aspx...ar1=105&var2=0

shadowalker

I'm not an ATI users other than whats in my gamecube so i would have no use to read the artical sorry.

I have no problems with there company, i just use nvidia cards for main stream and a workstation at work has the fire gl's and there great cards. Also think, (yea its very rare that it happens) but if you fug up the bios flash, you pretty much fug up the card also.

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