ATI 9800 Pro and 3D Software
Hello-
Has anyone had any experience with the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (offered as the high-end video card on new G5's) and 3d software, paricularly Alias/Wavefront Maya? I've heard about 9800's overheating (not sure if it was mac or pc models) and i just wanted to get general feedback about people's experience with the 9800 under graphically intense operations. Thanks!!!
Has anyone had any experience with the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (offered as the high-end video card on new G5's) and 3d software, paricularly Alias/Wavefront Maya? I've heard about 9800's overheating (not sure if it was mac or pc models) and i just wanted to get general feedback about people's experience with the 9800 under graphically intense operations. Thanks!!!
Comments
Originally posted by bedrock22
Hello-
Has anyone had any experience with the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (offered as the high-end video card on new G5's) and 3d software, particularly Alias/Wavefront Maya? I've heard about 9800's overheating (not sure if it was mac or pc models) and i just wanted to get general feedback about people's experience with the 9800 under graphically intense operations. Thanks!!!
bedrock22,
I have a Dual 2GHz G5 with the 9800 Pro and run Maya, Carrara, Form-Z, Lightwave, FCP, DVDSP, Photoshop, Illustrator and so on and have had no problems with overheating.
The system gets warm when running some heavy jobs, but with the good airflow in the G5 I can't see overheating on the 9800 Pro being a problem. I can see it being a problem if you put the card in an older G4 system (or put it in a Windows Mico AT form factor PC box) and didn't have enough airflow. All of the new high-end graphics cards tend to be massive heat generators. The big thing to make sure of is that you have proper ventilation for your system.
Also to note, most of these apps (3D or not) don't really push the graphics card as hard as video games do. Unfortunately most of the 3D apps on the market (Mac and PC) only take partial advantage of the actual geometry crunching abilities found in the new high-end graphics cards. 3D video games are one of the only things (on the mac that is) that take full advantage of the graphics horse power out there.
I work with real-time 3D graphics and simulations and they are one of the only types of apps that I know of that really utilize 100% of the horse power found in the new graphics cards today. Unless you are working in OpenGL or a real-time 3D program, most 3D apps do the bulk of their rendering on the CPU(s) of a system. So the faster your CPU the faster you get your renders. The 3D cards have their biggest impact when you are actually doing the setup work and creation stuff in a 3D apps like Maya and Lightwave. There are a few new apps on the horizon that might change this, but they aren't out yet.
Hope this helps.
- G in the S
Originally posted by G in the S
I work with real-time 3D graphics and simulations and they are one of the only types of apps that I know of that really utilize 100% of the horse power found in the new graphics cards today.
Are you doing the real-time sims on a Mac?
I do real-time 3D sims as well, and would love to be able to do that on a Mac, but have not found suitable software, so I'm stuck using PCs for that stuff.
If you are doing this on a Mac would you mind telling me what software you're using?
-- Mark
Originally posted by ryukyu
Are you doing the real-time sims on a Mac?
I do real-time 3D sims as well, and would love to be able to do that on a Mac, but have not found suitable software, so I'm stuck using PCs for that stuff.
If you are doing this on a Mac would you mind telling me what software you're using?
Unfortunately this work is being done on a Windows PC, for now. The commercial simulation companies are still stuck on Windows, Linux and SGI. But with many of them now supporting Linux, and the number of Macs increasingly growing in high end graphics areas, I suspect it is only a matter of time.
The product that I would love to have on my Mac for real-time stuff is MultiGen Creator. Hands down the best real-time 3D polygon modeler on the market. It is very expensive, but worth the money if you build simulations for a living. I don't like MultiGen's runtime engine (Vega Prime) all that much. So I have been using Open Scene Graph . The cool thing about Open Scene Graph is that it IS Mac OS X compatible. In fact you can run it on Windows, Linux, SGI, SUN, FreeBSD and the Mac OS. I don't consider it a commercial product, although it is a better runtime engine than most of the commercial ones on the market. I have heard rumors that MultiGen, and someone else in the real-time 3D market, are looking at moving to support the Mac. But only time will tell.
- G in the S
Originally posted by G in the S
I have heard rumors that MultiGen, and someone else in the real-time 3D market, are looking at moving to support the Mac. But only time will tell.
- G in the S
It's funny that you mention this.
Creator is what I use as well, and after having bugged my sales rep about the possibility of an OSX port, all I got back was that the subject has never even come up. But, of course, he's just a sales rep.
I'll have to take a look at Open Scene Graph. We are still using Vega, because we've found to many bugs in Vega Prime, and we also don't have the time to go back and recompile everything that we've done in the past.
I've also been looking at Carbongraphics Geo for modeling. I really don't like Creator, as I think it's interface and modeling tools are not very efficient. Too much relinace on that grid too.
If Open Scene Graph runs in OSX, maybe I can use Maya to do the polygonal modeling and then use that to run it. I'll have to see if that will work. Of course, ultimately I'll have to take it back into Creator to optimize, do LODs, etc.
Thanks for the info!!
I am thinking of changing the card to the ATI Radeon 9800 XT, as that has a shipping date of 6 days (and I will also save $300)....
It would primarily be for Maya modelling. Can you give me a big thumbs up that Maya works fine with this card?
I really need the new computer soon.
iDunno
Originally posted by iDunno
Hi everyone, I just want some additional feedback, and a bit of encouragement. A month ago I ordered a dual 2 g5 with the nVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL card. I have been waiting for a month, and it looks as tho I still have another month to wait, but I finish school in two months, and I am approaching a big project and NEED the computer now.
I am thinking of changing the card to the ATI Radeon 9800 XT, as that has a shipping date of 6 days (and I will also save $300)....
It would primarily be for Maya modelling. Can you give me a big thumbs up that Maya works fine with this card?
I really need the new computer soon.
iDunno
What kind of work are you doing, and how do you like to work?
The reason I ask is that although it works fine, there are some caveats. First of all, the card works better with Maya 6 than with previous versions.
Secondly, if you start to get heavy geometry, use dynamics, paint effects, and hardware texturing, it will bog down after a while.
I recently did a model that ended up being 456 mb in size and what I ended up having to do was to extensively use layers so that I could turn some things off to be abke to work more efficiently.
I would also switch back and forth from shaded mode to wireframe when I had to manipulate views.
In fairness, I use a Dell Precision workstation with a Quadro 1100 card at work and it struggled a bit with the model as well. Not quite as much as the Radeon 9800, but it was fairly close.
Wow, I hope this doesn't come off as negative. For me, this is an extreme case, and what I'm really trying to show is that even with a large file, there are ways to make it work.
For most of the work that I do, it's more than able to handle it.
I hope this helps.