Benefits of Video Card other than Gaming

[amira]

I have a video card Radeon x800. I purchased it to play games like Half Life2, FarCry etc.

How are video cards useful when using 3D applications like Studio Max, Maya, Softimage etc? Does it speed up rendering and spinning 3D objects faster and so on?

[johns0]

Yes it does.Pros use different video cards for better rendering such as fire gl and quadro.

[guns1inger]

Anything that uses open-gl or directx for rendering will benefit. Often the difference between the pro cards and the gaming cards is firmware or bios based, rather than physical differences, although pro cards may have faster memory cores. Since the early days of the nVidia Geforce cards it has been possible to softmod them to use the quadro-drivers and to unlock certain features only available in quadro (pro) cards.

Note though - some of the optimisations that pro cards make use of can adversly affect optimisations made for gamers. Swings and roundabouts.

[pfh]

Most of the time, your graphics adapter doesn't do much to actually aid in video work except when creating fancy menus with 3d stuff and such. In the case of fancy dvd menu rendering and authoring requiring heavy dose of "graphical" effects then a higher end card would help speed the process up.

[amira]

How about for 3D modelling?
Is my current Radeon X800 Pro ok? Does it speed up 3D rendering when using above mentioned applications?

[pfh]

Yes, that card is at the high end consumer level for now.

[guns1inger]

no. it doesn't speed up rendering for scaline or raytrace rendering. some apps, such as maya, have a hybrid hardware shader mode that will benefit, but only cpu or specialist raytrace assist hardware will speed up general rendering.

a fast gfx card does help when modelling, as you can throw around large numbers of polys without slowing down.