I've been reading reviews galore and just get confused as to what I should purchase.

I recently purchased an ATI Radeon 9600XT and liked it for the most part; newer games play well. But, then I opened Houdini Apprentice and couldn't get it to work (even with some environment variables set to what was suggested). The store where I bought the card said that they would exchange it for an nVidia card (since their OpenGL drivers are better than ATI's) and then I would just have to pay the difference; nice of them to do this since I've had the card for 23 days already.

The geForce 6800 looks like a nice card; but, I have a 350 W power supply and they suggest, I think, a 480 W supply minimum and I don't want to up the power supply just yet. What is the FX 5600 Ultra like; or, what is comparible to the ATI Radeon 9600XT or better? Price is a factor also. I paid $275 CDN for the ATI but am willing to go $100 to $150 more. I want to use this card in Houdini Apprentice as well as the new DirectX9 games and I can't afford the workstation cards.

Thanks.

cyclinggimpe
I've been reading reviews galore and just get confused as to what I should purchase.

I recently purchased an ATI Radeon 9600XT and liked it for the most part; newer games play well. But, then I opened Houdini Apprentice and couldn't get it to work (even with some environment variables set to what was suggested). The store where I bought the card said that they would exchange it for an nVidia card (since their OpenGL drivers are better than ATI's) and then I would just have to pay the difference; nice of them to do this since I've had the card for 23 days already.

The geForce 6800 looks like a nice card; but, I have a 350 W power supply and they suggest, I think, a 480 W supply minimum and I don't want to up the power supply just yet. What is the FX 5600 Ultra like; or, what is comparible to the ATI Radeon 9600XT or better? Price is a factor also. I paid $275 CDN for the ATI but am willing to go $100 to $150 more. I want to use this card in Houdini Apprentice as well as the new DirectX9 games and I can't afford the workstation cards.

Thanks.

If you can't afford a workstation card, the 6800 is a perfectly good way to go - especially if you're just learning the software. Wait until you have a job & can let someone else fork over the big bucks for hardware.

Anyway, the nVidia cards can be soft-modded into thinking they are Quadros (search “soft quadro” and “RivaTuner”, at guru3d.com). It isn't a perfect solution, but it generally works pretty well.

The 6800 is a whole new beast- it supports Pixel Shader 3.0 and is the ONLY card out right now that does. Pixel Shader 3.0 is the hardware rendering technology that allows streamless branching, texture reads in Vertex shaders, and unlimited shader length for your HLSL shaders.

If you don't care about this (and there isn't much software that takes advantage of these things yet- ATI's RenderMonkey and NVidia's FX Composer do), then don't worry about it- but it is the wave of the future, and if Houdini ever supports OpenGL 2.0 for hardware rendering with VOPs or something, it will most likely only be for cards that have unlimited shader length like this one.

The hardware rendering demos with the 6800 are very impressive- much more so than the other cards you are talking about, even Quadro's.

-Craig

It looks like the 6800 is a bit too steap in price for me at the moment. I am getting the FX 5900XT, which I think is a good card.

You can get a 6800 LT for 200 Euros, it has only 8 pixel pipelines compared to the 16 pipelines from the Ultra version, ceaper memory and less MHz but I would prefer it over a FX card because of the Shader Model 3.0 feature set. Also if you can wait a month the 6600 GT and 6600 will be very good cards for 200 and 150 Euros.

The ATI problem with professional OpenGL software is not a surprise, many people have problems with ATI gaming cards and Maya and XSI.

I have run Houdini successfully on Windows with a GeForce 3 Ti 200, which is a pretty old card by today's standards.

I also ran Houdini with my geforce 2 Pro card with no problem. It finally died and that's why I need a new card. I am getting the nVidia's 5900XT because that is all I can afford at the moment. I'm still waiting for it though so I can't continue with learning Houdini at the moment.

I use a cheesy FX5200 at home, and it's fine with Houdini. About $70 US. However, you get MUCH faster performance using any Nvidia or ATI (fireGL) card using Linux, when using Houdini.

Cheers,

Peter B