3d Rendering Cards
 

I was thinkging of picking up a cheap card desinged for rendering, i was just wondering if they make and improvment to rendering times and so on. I was thinking of geting the Ati Fire Gl4 any help would be great.

I might be wrong, but I was always under the impression that the renderer had to support the use of a hardware card, so in the case of Lightwave, you'll be wasting your money...

I believe Max, Maya and XSI however do have this support...

You might be right i will have to research it a little more, i will be geting the card pretty cheap if i do somthing like $100 australian rather then the $1200 retail price.

When I upgraded from my AMD Thunderbird 1.4ghz to my AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 my rendering times skyrocketed.
Making a hypervoxel scene which would take like 30 mins now took only about 8-10.
I'm still using my ATI Radeon 9700 Pro too. Graphics cards are optimized for real time rendering so I think newtek use processor power instead of graphics card so it's more stable.

Definetly do some more research in it though.

Hell, if you're getting the bugger that cheap, then I'd buy it an eBay it anyhow :)

suerly on board ram must make a differance?

If you're referring to RAM on board the video card, then really, for Lightwave usage, you're not that concerned except for use as an OpenGL framebuffer in Layout/Modeller (so anything over 64Meg should be fine)...

If you're referring to onboard system RAM, then yes, the more the merrier...

When it comes to video cards, how much ram the card has does not have much effect on its speed. The speed usualy depends on how fast the GPU core speed is and how many pipline just to name a few things.

And i won the bid i will be receiving it in a few days so i will tell ya how it goes once i get it. Even if it does not work well i can just flog it off on ebay.

And this is the card but im not paying the price there asking i got it for somthihg like $75.

Video Card

Got the card a couple of days agom, after a lot of trouble of putting it in , as i had to change motherboards because my other mobo did not have AGP Pro. I tryed rendering a sceen that uses to take me 20 to 30 mins, and wiht the new card it to about 30seconds. The sceen was not to simple, 2 transparent objects one in side of the other wiht a reflective base and hdri world map also it was set at 16rays. Saddley for some reason it keeps blue screening witch is annoying.

Wow, that's one hell of a difference. Try popping your old video card in the slot with the new mobo though to make sure that's not the real reason :)