o/t wildcat vp880 pro & mastercam

[pronc]

Hi gurus,

 

i'm getting a new box and this video card is my 1st choice. i'd like to have your input. the box is mainly for proe and mastercam. the quadro 900 xgl i have right now can't handle the load. i'm running dualview. thank you in advance for all your input.

[Rick Damiani]

What computer will you be using this in, and in what way is the Quadro not handling the load? Graphics performance, like any aspect of computer performance, is like a set of pipes. The limit is the smallest pipe your data has to pass through. i.e. if you got a 3,000 GPM pump on the input and a 6" pipe on the output, you ain't gonna move much water if the two of them are connected by a garden hose.

 

What you need to consider are:

 

- AGP bus speed. You want an 8X port to get the most out of any video board.

- CPU. Faster is better. More is better. Hyperthreading is better.

- RAM. Lots of it, as fast as you can get.

 

i.e. a PIII with PC133 RAM and a 2X AGP port is not going to necessaraly use a Quadro to it's fullest. Replacing the Quadro with a Wildcat is like swapping the 3,000 GPM pump with a 6,000 GPM unit. The limit is still the garden hose, and your water movement will stay the same.

[pronc]

Rich,

 

the future box will have:

 

mobo: gigabyte ga-8knxp

cpu: 3.2 ghz

memoy: 2 gig

video card: wildcat vp880 pro

 

the one will be replaced is a 2.4 ghz dell workstation 2 gig memory. 900 xgl quadro

 

i have a dualview set up. when i have mastercam open in one monitor and 2 sessions of proe open in the other one, i can see the decrease in graphic performance. the assembly can't hardly move. hopefully an extra 128 mb of video ram will solve the problem. i could be wrong. that's why i'm seeking all of your input. Rich, thank you for the reply.

[Rick Damiani]

My experence with high-end graphics cards on commodity systems has been pretty bad, to tell you the truth. After throwing a good deal of perfectly good money at high-zoot graphics cards, I either found that the underlying systems own bottlenecks were the limiting factor, or that the imprevement in performance was only measureable with a benchmark program.

 

Looking at the review of the VP870 on Tom's Hardware Guide tells me that the situation hasn't changed much.

 

Look here:

Tom's Guide

 

The performance improvement you can expect seems to be pretty small, percentage wise. On the viewperf proe test (which sounds most relevant to what you are doing), it's only ~11%. Not really gonna be noticeable in practice.

 

My suggusiton: Don't bother to replace the card in the existing system. The (minor) improvement in performance isn't worth the $500.00 the card will cost. Go ahead and put one in the new system though. It's a couple dollars cheaper than a 980XGL, and offers about the same level of performance.

 

FWIW, 3D Labs was my long-time favorite video card manufacturer, because their drivers were always tip-top. I hope that commitment to quality has survived the buy-out by Creative Labs.

[gcode]

I had a 32 meg Quadro on my home machine that

bogged down pretty badly on large SolidWorks assemblies. Turning the color setting down from 32 bit to 16 helped a lot. It might help in your case.

[pronc]

Rick and Gcode,

 

thank you for your input.

[Rick Damiani]

The (original) Quadro was a bumpin' card in it's day, but it's day is long past. A GeForce4 is cheap and offers signifigantly better performance. That's what I replaced the Quadro DCC in my office workstaion with.

 

[ 08-24-2003, 01:45 AM: Message edited by: Rick Damiani ]