What video card do you use for combustion 4.0?

Generally speaking, you can't go wrong with the nVidia Quadro FX series, particularly the 3000 and 4000 model range. Pricey, but worth it if you need a solid, well-supported product.

nvidia quadro FX. the higher the number, the better the card.

ie: fx1400 not bad, fx4500 goooood

//gD

For the moment I'm using an eVGA nVidia 6600GT card that I paid about $125 for, works well with everything and has decent performance.

I'm also planning to use a 7800GT on my next PCI Express workstation, this is not the highest performance card but within a few percent of that, with less heat and noise to boot.

When buying an nVidia card, it makes a difference which manufacturer you go with. Some have true lifetime warranties on their cards, some have lifetime warranties that expire when the card is superseded by a newer model, and some have the common 3-12 month "good luck" warranties.

I like eVGA's nVidia cards in this category, because they have a true lifetime warranty, and they seem to write solid drivers. OpenGL 2.0 is important for many of us, and even my measly card has that.

The other non-workstation card manufacturers are often well behind in OpenGL because they focus so intensely on gamers.

Even Lightwave 3D tech support suggested using good gaming cards instead of the workstation cards that are so vastly more expensive.

Yes, there are those who truly need the specific features of say the FX4500, but far from everybody using Combustion.

Hi Kuky,

What is the card manufacturers for the GeForce 6800.

Thanks
-=Jesse=-

Thanks for that very astute post. It's a mystery to me also why an older flame (Octane MXE for example), with an SGI graphics card that looks like it came from the 1970s, easily outperforms any other compositing software, C4 included (for non-processor rendered effects). All these programs use OpenGL now! That model of flame is like 7-8 years old.

Flint and Flame are very mature products, and were designed from the beginning to utilize OpenGL hardware extensively. For example, there's no such thing as "OpenGL mode" in FFI, it's OpenGL by default (except for CPU-bound rendering). I'm betting that the superior interactivity of the older SGI systems is mostly due to the level of optimization discreet has made to its software running on SGI graphics hardware, not due to any inherent advantages of the SGI hardware itself. I haven't heard indicataions that the SGI systems' OpenGL performance is anything but outdated when discussing 3D applications.

Also, keep in mind that Autodesk lacks motivation to substantially improve OpenGL performance in Combustion because it wants to avoid cannibalizing its high end discreet systems division.

I got a quadro fx 700 on eBay for $89 (only a 128mb card) and it kills the ATI Radeon 9800 SE 256 card. And it destroys the nVidia FX 5700LE 256mb card that was in that system before the ATI card. FYI

I already had one system with a Quadro FX 3000 which again I got on ebay for a little over $350 (it is even faster of course).

I'm not sure of all but I do know that PNY is one of them.