Rendering video card

[Amitojc]

I use software that requires alot of rendering so I was wondering what are the best kind of video cards best for rendering. I hear that the nivida gpus are better for that. If you can let me know let me know! Thanks

 

[happy medium]

Nvidia quadro line.

http://www.nvidia.com/page/quadrofx_family.html

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Rendering on all the major graphic programs I'm aware of is tied more to the number of processing cores than the GPU. However, as happy medium has mentioned the quadro or fire pro line will aid significantly in preprocessing.

 

[3DVagabond]

What's the software you are using? As MagnusTheBrewer said, most 3D graphics software uses the CPU for rendering.

 

[slayernine]

If you want to see if your GPU is being utilized download the latest build of GPU-Z. Then run it and check your GPU utilization and compare it to your CPU utilization in task manager. If while rendering you are using your CPU primarily you should not upgrade your graphics as it won't help anything. As stated most 3D rendering software such as Maya or 3DS Max use CPU for rendering and use GPU for the live scene viewer.

CPU is needed largely to support types of renderings like ray tracing that cannot currently be performed on a GPU. (at least to the best of my knowledge) Intel has made some inroads in this field with the development of larabee.

 

[slayernine]

Nvidia quadro line.

http://www.nvidia.com/page/quadrofx_family.html

Its been my experience in the IT industry that many admins, consultants and technicians will influence business people to purchase machines with enormously powerful graphics processing capabilities for tasks that are truly CPU intensive and do not utilize the graphics card to a large degree.

Examples of situations quadro or firepro is not needed to a large extent:
Video Editing
Video Rendering
3D Rendering
Multi-monitor Display Setups

Unless you have software that actually takes advantage of your GPU you don't need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a graphics card. Relatively low end discrete graphics are usually more than enough. The newer fusion and similar products will even eliminate the need for discrete graphics in these applications in the future I believe.

My thoughts and opinion are just that but the only common utilization of power graphics cards is still gaming. Not that I wouldn't love if there was an easy way to offload work to my graphics card in my everyday work. Nice to see in the newer versions of Photoshop GPU's are actually used a bit.

 

[Viditor]

Its been my experience in the IT industry that many admins, consultants and technicians will influence business people to purchase machines with enormously powerful graphics processing capabilities for tasks that are truly CPU intensive and do not utilize the graphics card to a large degree.

Examples of situations quadro or firepro is not needed to a large extent:
Video Editing
Video Rendering
3D Rendering
Multi-monitor Display Setups

Unless you have software that actually takes advantage of your GPU you don't need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a graphics card. Relatively low end discrete graphics are usually more than enough. The newer fusion and similar products will even eliminate the need for discrete graphics in these applications in the future I believe.

My thoughts and opinion are just that but the only common utilization of power graphics cards is still gaming. Not that I wouldn't love if there was an easy way to offload work to my graphics card in my everyday work. Nice to see in the newer versions of Photoshop GPU's are actually used a bit.

I would disagree with a caveat...in video editing when you render transitions, or in areas where you need to see what you are going to render, a Quadro or Fire card is VERY helpful (almost necessary). These cards let you do a low res render-on-the-fly which means your work is much more efficient.
So 3 of those categories (exception is Multi-monitor Display Setups) are greatly helped by the workstation cards.
Of course, they start at ~$125 and go up to many thousands (if you need to real-time render in 2k).
What you won't get is all of the shaders that gamers need...but for professional rendering and video work, don't settle for less.
Quadro and Fire are both on par with each other, but many of the drivers are written into the software. For example, Avid will only work with Quadro cards...they aren't any better, but they got there first.

 

[tweakboy]

Yes, nVidia Quadro