GeForce 6600 and Maya

ti fighterti fighter
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
Would like to run Maya on a quad machine but it only has the 6600 Now forgeting the whole fact that apple really needs to wise up and release the better cards for people who didn't BTO machines...



Has anyone run maya on this card with a quad? How's the performance? Is it work able or just plain pathetic? And or how much better does the 7800 run?



Thanks,



also has anyone ordered from we love mac's?



http://www.welovemacs.com/6613835.html





I may just bite down and build a PC for our 3d needs, Apple really needs to sort out this graphic card non-sence,

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,455moderator
    I have a quad with a 6600 but I haven't run Maya. I use Blender for 3D modelling and the performance is pretty good. I tested it with scenes of over 2 million polygons and it was acceptable. I find that with Blender being more lightweight though, it can handle bigger scenes better but Maya should come in around the same.



    Maya for OS X isn't very well optimized compared to the Windows version I heard though and that may have something to do with Blender being a bit faster.



    In terms of graphics performance, the quad plays Doom 3 on second highest setting (you need a 512MB card for highest) and with full everything else, it plays well but there is still occasional jitter.



    For me the 6600 is acceptable because I'm not a big gamer and in 3D I prefer low-res models with displacements and subdiv surfs letting the renderer take the brunt of the strain.



    If you absolutely needed the best performance, you could try the 7800 or even the quadro. I think I saw benchmarks somewhere that showed the 7800 to be double the speed of the 6600 but I'm not 100% sure about that.
  • Reply 2 of 6
    gregmightdothatgregmightdothat Posts: 1,709member
    Nonsense. Graphics cards may have been important five years ago, but any card is going to be more than enough for Maya. The Hardware Rendering isn't good enough where you'd actually use it, so the card is only good for preview, which has always been fine for me.



    I have an old Radeon 9800. The only time it slowed down was when working with really high sub-d's. And with mirroring turned on. But I'm pretty sure that was the CPUs. (Dual 2.0 G5)



    Granted though, I used Maya for modeling and a little animation, but not for expansive scenes. Even so, I don't think that'll be a problem?video games run fine, after all.
  • Reply 3 of 6
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,455moderator
    Quote:

    Originally posted by gregmightdothat

    Nonsense. Graphics cards may have been important five years ago, but any card is going to be more than enough for Maya. The Hardware Rendering isn't good enough where you'd actually use it, so the card is only good for preview, which has always been fine for me.



    Not any card will do for Maya if you are doing high resolution stuff otherwise high end cards wouldn't be bought but the 6600 will probably do in most cases. Extra VRam is handy for doing texture previews.



    The hardware rendering is good for seeing how animations play out e.g. dynamics simulations. Even so, it's not necessarily done in real-time anyway, it still renders to a buffer, it just uses the graphics chip to render instead of the CPU.
  • Reply 4 of 6
    im-0nim-0n Posts: 47member
    i only use a cheap geforce 6600 LE 1 gig of ram and dual core 2.0ghz..

    is it good enough 4 maya? what diference it will make if i add geforce 7800gt
  • Reply 5 of 6
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,455moderator
    Quote:

    Originally posted by iM-0N

    i only use a cheap geforce 6600 LE 1 gig of ram and dual core 2.0ghz..

    is it good enough 4 maya? what diference it will make if i add geforce 7800gt



    3D programs like Maya mostly use the CPU for rendering so a faster GPU won't do much at all for the rendering stage unless you do hardware effects - some particles in Maya are hardware rendered.



    It will speed up your viewport though and you will notice it on high resolution scenes - in theory, the 7800GT should handle double the scene size. I just found this on Apple's site:



    http://www.apple.com/powermac/graphics.html



    As I said, the 7800GT can be up to double the speed for hardware rendering - it has a lot more memory bandwidth so textures will display faster.



    Notice that the quadro isn't much higher than the 7800 though. Paying $1300 extra for it seems a bit of a waste when the 7800GT almost matches its performance. I guess you're paying for the stereo 3D output or something.
  • Reply 6 of 6
    ti fighterti fighter Posts: 863member
    yea my concern really is the open gl shaded previews in the perspective windows as I'm working, esp when dealing animation.
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