Hello!

I have an old GTX 460 1 gb and it performs not so good. I've been searching some answers about what videocard fits best for using Houdini, but found very different opinions.

My goal is to choose the best solution for 700-1000$ videocard, and here are some options:

- FirePro W7000
- Quadro K4000(just came out)
- GeForce Titan/ GTX 670-690
- Radeon 7970-7990

Also I want to pay attantion to GTX 580, 3 gb which is very popular and seems to perform good for every 3d package for its price, but it's difficult to find one in stores now.

Many times I heard that we should stick with Nvidia cards and ingore ATI for its crappy drivers, but some Radeon specs outbeats even high-end Quadros.

I'm a bit confused making a choice of a right card, really hope for your help!

If it's within your budget, the Nvidia Quadro K4000 appears to be a fine choice.

Nvidia has been doing some intriguing work with its OpenCL and CUDA development efforts lately. The choice could also depend on which platform you're running, as some operating systems don't support OpenGL 3.2 or higher yet.

The dual-GPU cards are not terribly useful for Houdini. Each GPU has half the VRAM, and Houdini can use 1 for compute and 1 for graphics. But if you're not using OpenCL, the other GPU is effectively a waste.

The K4000 and K2000 are good choices, depending on your budget. We haven't tested the Titan but early benchmark results seem to indicate that the current drivers are crashing with some OpenCL tests. Otherwise, it would likely be a good choice too, depending on how Nvidia decides to deal with the drivers for it.

Thanks for your replies!

I'm interested in how FirePro cards will perform, as they are built on OpenCL, while Quadros on CUDA. Will they outperform quadros 10x times in Pyro FX?