I am learning Houdini 12 right now and am currently running on the following specs

Core I7 970
GTX 470
24GB Ram

I am looking at either a quadro 4000 or a GTX 670. I am trying to figure out which will be a better investment. The GTX 470 works just fine in houdini 12 right now. Am I going to see a big improvement if i go to either of these cards. Also is this just to boost view port speed or will either of these cards actually help with render times? I have never owned a workstation card so I have no point of reference other then the specs listed from the hardware manufactures. If I solely go off of that the 670 should be better.

coffeboy23
I am learning Houdini 12 right now and am currently running on the following specs

Core I7 970
GTX 470
24GB Ram

I am looking at either a quadro 4000 or a GTX 670. I am trying to figure out which will be a better investment. The GTX 470 works just fine in houdini 12 right now. Am I going to see a big improvement if i go to either of these cards. Also is this just to boost view port speed or will either of these cards actually help with render times? I have never owned a workstation card so I have no point of reference other then the specs listed from the hardware manufactures. If I solely go off of that the 670 should be better.

You won't see any increase in render times. Also, since you already have a nice card, anything you get is going to be a fairly subtle update.

I would recommend a GTX 580 3GB. Having a lot of memory is a great thing, and this card is pretty fast. (faster than the 6* series in OGL apps AFAIK)

You will see some improvement, definitely, but it's probably not worth the extra money. The 670 is about twice as fast as the Quadro 4000, being about 2 years newer.

I suspect that the next generation of Quadros will be built on Nvidia's next GK110 architecture, at least at the high end, and an announcement at SIGgraph is likely considering the release timeframe for this GPU. So it might not be a bad idea to sit tight for a couple of months and see