Open GL

My experience is that you'll get all the OpenGL capability that you'll ever need for combustion from a standard gamers card. This is especially true with today's cards. The differences between these and the "professional" cards are not worth the exorbitant prices commanded by these cards.

for combustion that might be true, but pro cards like the quadro FX are all i will consider for 3d because they provide more options for both openGL and directX controls than a hopped up gamer card. since combustion benefits from these cards too, its all i buy. 'got five quadro FX cards and cant complain. if you do this for a living, you cant spend too much on a card or monitor, imho. i hate to see people work 40+ hours a week and have to complain cuz they are on a single 19" monitor driven by a shoddy graphics card, for example. the difference of a few hundred dollars is made up how quickly in your workday/week? (ie: whats your time worth and how much will you use the thing?)

//gD

gary m. davis // visualz.com
application training specialist
3ds Max | Combustion | Toxik
"don't key DV!"

On another forum a guy with a QuadroFX 4500 card said he had gotten no benefit with C4 over an NVidia Geforce7800.

However, he needed the 4500 for 3DS Max as well. He said the benefits there were huge.

hi guys.

i've put some personal research, comparing opengl rendering and processors rendering.

luckily, HP is kind enough to let me have the xw9300 (dual opteron 250) and dual quadro fx3450 (SLI bridged).

using dual opteron and a single quadro fx 3450, the software rendering is blazingly fast, and the opengl rendering is about half the speed of software rendering.

i encountered different results, when using dual quadro fx 3450 with SLI. it somehow increases the opengl rendering speed, doubling its performance, compares to single vga/without SLI.

but then, come again to the amount of $$ spent, it's much better to have more processors, rather than having dual pro vga cards in SLI. benefits are clear. cheaper, yet faster rendering/preview.

Hey all,

I am looking to increase my preview-rendering time with particle operators and composite operators in combustion 4 . What recommendations do you all have for me on a video card for my system.

I have a ATI FireGL V3100 (Vram is 128) in the computer described below.

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Dell: Precision 380 (http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=3094&page=)
OS: XP Pro
Prossessor: Intel P4 3.60Ghz (2 CPUs)
Memory: 2 Gigs
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Thannks
-=Jesse=-