We're looking at trading up from our Quadro FX 4600 cards, and I'm wondering what everyone else is using and why? On other forums I'm hearing that we should go with a GeForce card, which is not supported by Autodesk. I'm beginning to suspect that this is because Autodesk and Nvidia are pushing us toward the more pricey cards.

Thoughts?

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ChrisB IV 2011 Tube & Pipe (mostly)
Windows 7 Pro 64 Bit, Dell Precision T7500
NVIDIA Quadro FX 4600

"I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?!""

This is my opinion on the matter.

Maybe if I were doing huge Showcase or Max renders, I *might* consider going with a Quadro card. As you are probably aware, Inventor is a DirectX graphics protocol program now. What that means is that if your video card is certified to be DirectX by Microsoft, there is no reason it won't be supported by Inventor.

You can go to the Autodesk Discussion forums and search for the name "norbert" and you should find a lot of info on this subject. You can try that with these forums too. I know I've posted on this subject a lot here. What Norbert (an Autodesk employee) basically said is that Autodesk got sick of tuning Quadro drivers for each card they released. So they moved Inventor to DirectX to let Microsoft do the certification. That is why I said if it is certified DirectX it should work fine for Inventor. They encouraged us to save money on graphics card and apply that money to faster CPUs or more ram. Things that Inventor can take advantage of.

The funny thing is that when you run Autocad, Autocad is going to complain that the card isn't certified. I haven't really seen any issues from it though.

Another fun thing to do is to look at the Quadro cards that Nvidia offers. How many do they have and how often are they released? I'll give you a hint. Not many, and not often. Maybe once a year.

Now go look at the gGeForce cards. Their are tons of choices and they are usually released mulitple times a year. Then compare specs and prices. You can buy 2 of the high end GeForce cards for less money than most of the Quadros listed on the Nvidia website. So you could SLI 2 GeForce cards with faster card clock speeds and way more graphics memory for less money.

If It were my money, I think I would go GeForce. I think the Quadro stuff is now an overpriced scam.

This seems to be the general concensus that I'm hearing. Thanks for your opinion.... that's exactly what I was looking for.... anything BUT the "party line".

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ChrisB IV 2011 Tube & Pipe (mostly)
Windows 7 Pro 64 Bit, Dell Precision T7500
NVIDIA Quadro FX 4600

"I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?!""

I now work for an Autodesk reseller. My company gets a little jumpy if I ever recommend anything but Quadro cards only because they worry that if the customer has any issues, we are the ones that are going to take the blame. So I now gently nudge them in that direction and let them know their mileage may vary. I'm trying to stay in contact with the ones that do decide to go GeForce just so I can keep my finger on the situation and see how things work out.

Well, I'll be sure to keep you posted then on what we decide and how it works out for us.

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ChrisB IV 2011 Tube & Pipe (mostly)
Windows 7 Pro 64 Bit, Dell Precision T7500
NVIDIA Quadro FX 4600

"I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?!""

I have done some research on this topic. The two items published are here:

"Why should I buy a workstation Graphics Card?"
http://www.augi.com/images/uploads/augi ... 910_lr.pdf
"NVIDIA Quadro 5000M Unleashed on MCad"
http://designandmotion.net/hardware/har ... shed-mcad/

The DirectX issue is quite true up to a point. Since Inventor runs on DirectX, free of OpenGL, any certified card will work fine. The first article discusses the reason why this is a good thing. However, there is no substitute for the high end Quadro cards, if full-on capabilities are desired. The Quadros are optimized throughout the hardware for better stability, better support of calculation matrices, and better rendering speeds (when compared to the comperable platform mainstream 'game' card) . The latter article will point out some of these effects, noting however that the last article is discussing a very expensive graphics chipset.

I hope this helps.

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John Evans
Autodesk Certified Professional
http://designandmotion.net

Thank you!

It does help somewhat. In our application we do not do any surface modeling and never will, we don't do any high end animation or rendering or use any of the publishing tools such as Studio. We do straight up 3D modeling, a lot of frame generator and piping and bolted connection stuff, heavy on Content Center parts. All we need is a card that will keep our machines from bogging down as the assembly grows. The boxes themselves are a year old and loaded with the best we could find at the time... except the cards. We kept our old 4600's to save the $3500 of the new Quadro. Based on your research, it sounds to me like the GeForce would do what we need and then some. I've been looking at the GTX 580.

Do you agree, or am I reading your report incorrectly?

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ChrisB IV 2011 Tube & Pipe (mostly)
Windows 7 Pro 64 Bit, Dell Precision T7500
NVIDIA Quadro FX 4600

"I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?!""

I'm not sure we can ever settle this arguement until we get some real benchmarks. On equal hardware.

I'll see if I can attach an example. I've selected 2 video cards and priced them out on Newegg. A Gefore GTX 580 and a Quadro 5000. Lets look at these numbers and tell me if I am crazy. The GeForce GTX 580 goes for about $550 and the Quadro 5000 goes for $1,800. I could buy 2 GTX 580s and still have $700 in my pocket compared with the Quadro 5000. So the specs of the GTX 580 must be lower right? Well, not exactly. The GTX 580 has 1/2 a gig more video ram, more cuda cores and I *think* it runs at a faster clock. So for $1,100 I could get almost 3 times the video ram with way more cuda cores at a faster clock. I'm not seeing how I could go wrong here?

Why two GeForce cards?

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Ron
http://www.arken.net Engineering and Design
http://www.arkenstudios.com Professional Photography

Just to exaggerate the situation. You can link cards together to make them act as one giant card. Was just trying to point out that you could install 2 highend GeForce cards and still pay less money than you would for 1 midrange Quadro card.

There is a post on the Autodesk forums that I saw yesterday, which said that Inventor does not use or gain any benefit from linking of graphics cards. (SLI) If I can find it again, I'll post the link here.

I'm going to quote both the Quadro and the GeForce to present to management, and tell them what I've learned on these boards... I'm pretty sure I know what they'll decide.

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ChrisB IV 2011 Tube & Pipe (mostly)
Windows 7 Pro 64 Bit, Dell Precision T7500
NVIDIA Quadro FX 4600

"I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?!""

Ordered 2 of the GTX 580's this morning. 3g, I'm anxiously crossing my fingers that they do the trick for us... because I recommended them!

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ChrisB IV 2011 Tube & Pipe (mostly)
Windows 7 Pro 64 Bit, Dell Precision T7500
NVIDIA Quadro FX 4600

"I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?!""

You wont be disappointed with those cards with Inventor. Overkill if you ask me but what man would ever turn down more speed. lol
I used a old G-Force 7300 out of a old Dell computer with a 30 day trail of Inventor 2012 and it ran perfectly.

2 of our workstations are using 9600GT cards and I've just upgraded my home PC to a GTX560Ti - all of them running Inventor 2012 & Studio Max with no major issues. In fact, if anything, I'm having more random graphics problems on my laptop (HP Elitebook 8730W - Quadro FX2700M) than on the other machines.....

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=12599

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Jas

Inventor 2013 Product Design Suite
HP 8730W Elitebook
Win7 x64
Quadro FX2700M

The hardware gurus at Autodesk said Inventor does not support SLI or Crossfire at all at this time.