Im mostly a lightwave user, but Im keeping an eye on houdini and the apprentice version.
My current card is a quadro fx 1100

I need a newer card thou with cuda and Im thinking either nvidia gtx 480
or the quadro fx 3800.

what would you guys recommend for taking advantages of the latest houdini 11.

Faster fluid sims,dynamic simulations and volumetrics are of interest.
Everyone keeps telling me not to go with quadro fx 3800 thou.
mostly it is supposed to be just optimized drivers and certified drivers for the 3800 card.
so now it stands between the gtx 480 or quadro fx 3800
not sure if there´s an open gl difference between them and how that
would be relative to the latest houdini 11 opengl enhancements.

the ram will be 2x6 gb and a Intel Core i7 3.06 GHz or a slightly better cpu.

Thanks for any advice.
ps. edit…at work we have a lot of cad solidworks to lightwave machines
reaching almost 1 million polycount, but we are probably not getting any card updates there..but for my personal work it might be needed.

Michael

Is there really No one in these houdini forums that can provide any advice or suggestion on this topic?

Michael

I was planning to get the gtx480 myself as well - it's got such a huge amount of stream processors on it that it's a very attractive option for all those cuda calculations. I can't help you with the comparison as I've never used a quadro before (at work it's also geforce cards).

Considering that houdini 11 has made a lot of viewport enhancements in terms of lighting and shading, I would assume a better graphics card will give you better performance if you turn on the high quality viewport options.

The gtx480 is fairly new and so it's only normal not that many people have it in their systems.
I found this review pretty good though:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-470-480-review/ [guru3d.com]

thanks pclaes, well according to specifications gtx 480 has open gl 2.1
and quadro fx 3800 has 3.0…so Im not sure if that will be much different, but Im sure curious about how houdinis new opengl enhancements are taking use of the 3.0 opengl or if it´s no difference at all.

shader model is the same.
I believe the gtx 480 is a newer card and also has more cuda cores.

Michael

“Faster fluid sims,dynamic simulations and volumetrics are of interest.”

Video cards have nothing to do with this what so ever, with one exception. If the software is setup to use NVIDIA's Physix, then the simulations can be accelerated. Most aren't, so all the weight for your sims will be on your CPU.

I've used Quadro's since they game out (ELSA's original Quadro card). What they give you is better OpenGL support and wireframe acceleration with anti-aliasing. This is generally more important to CAD folks, but can matter to more general 3D folks as well. Houdini is an OpenGL application and so will benefit from robust OpenGL support.

Geforce cards (all varieties) are gaming cards. What does this mean? Well they're optimized for speed for one, not quality. OpenGL support is not their driver's focus, DirectX is. Shaded polys are the focus, wireframes are not. With the CUDA enabled cards, you have a hell of a lot of power there as the current crop of GPU Renders will show you, BUT (and it's a big but) those renderers are not ready for production in film and animation, missing critical features like motion blur and micropoly displacement.

Now all that being said, you're thinking I would lean you to Quadro, yes? Not necessarily. What I will say though is this, with my Quadros I've never had a problem with any of the 3D applications I've had to run (Max, Maya, Houdini, etc.) I've read accounts of viewport issues with gaming cards, but they've always been vague. So what I would advise you to do, selfishly, is play the guinea pig. Make sure you order your card from someone with a decent return policy and try the 480GTX. Let us know if it works well in Houdini and your other applications and if it does, you just saved yourself a nice chuck of change. If not, you return it and call the restocking fee the price of the lesson. If however, you're not up for experimenting, all I can tell you is the the Quadro is a safe bet (albeit a more expensive one).

nimajneb
“Faster fluid sims,dynamic simulations and volumetrics are of interest.”

Video cards have nothing to do with this what so ever, with one exception. If the software is setup to use NVIDIA's Physix, then the simulations can be accelerated. Most aren't, so all the weight for your sims will be on your CPU.

I've used Quadro's since they game out (ELSA's original Quadro card). What they give you is better OpenGL support and wireframe acceleration with anti-aliasing. This is generally more important to CAD folks, but can matter to more general 3D folks as well. Houdini is an OpenGL application and so will benefit from robust OpenGL support.

Geforce cards (all varieties) are gaming cards. What does this mean? Well they're optimized for speed for one, not quality. OpenGL support is not their driver's focus, DirectX is. Shaded polys are the focus, wireframes are not. With the CUDA enabled cards, you have a hell of a lot of power there as the current crop of GPU Renders will show you, BUT (and it's a big but) those renderers are not ready for production in film and animation, missing critical features like motion blur and micropoly displacement.

Now all that being said, you're thinking I would lean you to Quadro, yes? Not necessarily. What I will say though is this, with my Quadros I've never had a problem with any of the 3D applications I've had to run (Max, Maya, Houdini, etc.) I've read accounts of viewport issues with gaming cards, but they've always been vague. So what I would advise you to do, selfishly, is play the guinea pig. Make sure you order your card from someone with a decent return policy and try the 480GTX. Let us know if it works well in Houdini and your other applications and if it does, you just saved yourself a nice chuck of change. If not, you return it and call the restocking fee the price of the lesson. If however, you're not up for experimenting, all I can tell you is the the Quadro is a safe bet (albeit a more expensive one).

Thanks for your suggestions, but aren´t you a little bit wrong with that video cards has nothing to do with simulations? as I understand it bullet dynamic engine takes advantage of cuda processors for simulation, ergo houdini and future lightwave core bullet engine would benifit from that.

and apart from that I believe there´s some special designed showcase
fluid engines that utilizes cuda for showcasing that specificly, but no
Big 3d app currently do, but point being made that fluid engines might show up and be written with that in mind.

Also Octane renderer looks promising, and at work Im interested to
spit out good renders in still format for gym machines, currently using a mix of lightwave fprime and lightwaves own renderer depending on.
So right now cuda renderer for animation right now isn´t a big deal.

And aftereffects filters is also something I heard should benifit from cuda, or just the amount of processors ,not sure thou.

The gtx 480 offers some enhancements in wireframe antialiasing as I understand it, how well the open gl 4 and shader model works I don´t know.

Sure quadro fx for cad, but that depends on what you construct I guess.
My collegue is workin on a geforce oem g230 and g100 and it works
to construct our gym machines pretty well, the problem is when converting those to polys around 800 000 polys and moving around in open gl in lightwave modeler, its a bit easier in layout and also working with bounding box limits wich kicks in when rotating certain high level polys.

I have the older card quadro fx1100 at home but I will replace that with
the gtx 480.

I actually ordered one gtx 460 card new machine to replace our g100 here at work.

haven´t ordered the gtx 480 yet, it wasn´t available at the netcompany until a couple of days.
Im also throwing in 12 gb of ram and a I7 core 960 processor.
the ram would probably help a little bit handling those heavy poly objects.

Thanks again
Michael

Ayep, you're correct. I've not read much about Bulllet, so I didn't know it had CUDA optimizations. I was thinking base packages like Max, Maya and before this integration, Houdini. I'll have to do some more research and find out just how much of Bullet is in Houdini and if it can accelerate general dynamics networks.

GTX 480 offering wireframe acceleration and anti-aliasing would be news to me as well. Shaded view anti-aliasing, sure, but wireframes have always been the pervue of Quadro. It wouldn't make financial sense for them to enable it for the gaming cards. If you've links to articles about that, I'd be interested in seeing them.

*P.S. Did some more looking up and it appears that Bullet is only for convex RBD solving (not surprising as that it's a game physics engine). That means any of your other sims are still going to be sitting exclusively on the CPU. It maybe that someday fluid sims will get piped into CUDA in Houdini, but that doesn't appear to be the case as of the moment.