Graphics Card

[john.pallares]

What is a good graphics card for either Windows64 or XP64? I would like to know what would work best for 3D Solid Modeling in AutoCAD ver. 2013 or later.

Thank you for your help.

[jaberwok]

Pretty much any nVidia or ATi card over about $100 will do but how much do you want to spend?
$100, $3000 or anywhere in between.
What connections do you want for your monitors and how heavy are your models?

[arshiel88]

If you are getting an nVidia card, if you want your experience to have "with ease" factor, get any model with the "GTX" in it or newer.

[john.pallares]

Thank you jaberwok for helping me.

$2,500 to $3,000 is the price range for a high end graphics card. I am guessing a DP and/or DVI for the connections.

6.0GB NVIDA Quadro 6000, DP and 1 DVI with SJI is the most attractive card, but I don't know if Autodesk supports this new card. You would happen to know if this NVIDA Quadro 6000 is supported by Autodesk.

The 3D models range from 10mb to 100mb plus.

[john.pallares]

Thank you arshiel88 for helping me.

I am a novice, what does GTX stand for and how would this help in my 3D AutoCAD drawings? I will check out the NVIDA web site.

[cadtag]

$2,500 to $3,000 is the price range for a high end graphics card. I am guessing a DP and/or DVI for the connections.

6.0GB NVIDA Quadro 6000, DP and 1 DVI with SJI is the most attractive card,

probably a good choice if you want to do bitcoin mining....

GTX is the label that Nvidia considers their 'gaming' cards. Generally pretty good for CAD work, and some benchmarks put them higher than the AMD FirePros in CAD performance.

If you are thinking that you'll use ReCap with 2014, check the openGL drivers and verify that the version is current (3.3 IIRC)

[heath.simone]

Another curve ball to the mix...

With the benchmarking I’ve done using the Revit Benchmark and the AutoCAD CADALYST benchmark - I've found the ATI Radeon series cards gave better performance in Revit where the Nvidia GTX cards where better in AutoCAD...

Something else to be aware of is the power requirements of the cards - again ATI tend to use less power than the Nvidia cards, so depending on your power supply wattage it might be something to be aware of. We use the HP desktop machines for our standard CAD box with the ATI 7850 card and they are more than adequate for

[jaberwok]

The nVidia Quadro 5000 is certified for AutoCAD so I imagine that 1) the 6000 will work just fine and 2) it will soon be certified.

Following from heath.simone's comment - the 6000 takes 204 Watts - that's the entire power supply output of some basic Dell and HP machines.

[arshiel88]

...
$2,500 to $3,000 is the price range for a high end graphics card.
...

wow, thats a lot for a graphic card! mine is a GTX 560 and is just less than $300. Just make sure you utilize the graphic card's features so you value its cost and wont go "overkill" for the task at hand.

The GTX 560 requires 450 watts minimum.

Maybe its good to invest on graphic card nowadays. GPU rendering is now trending. I hope Autodesk will follow soon. I think they already started by introducing iRay Renderer in 3ds max. Maybe soon it will be available in AutoCAD too like Mental Ray.

[bjames.164872]

For the average architect and engineer it is not worth the expenditure to buy an expensive video card. Buy the cheapest video card that is certified by Autodesk and spend a little to upgrade the clock speed of your machine, or install an SSD, and you will have better overall performance. Autocad and Revit don't tax the video card very much but rely a lot on processor speed.

I have run recent versions of autocad and revit on a wide variety of hardware under 32 bit OS's with no difficult and no problems with speed. OTOH we have had problems with video cards that weren't autodesk certified when running under 64 bit Windows 7.

My computer at work, mandated by my company, has an expensive Quadro 4000 and is a real dog performance-wise. It has a XEON processor and a lot of ram, running 64 bit Windows 7. My old Dell laptop with old dual core processor and generic graphics is as fast or faster, running 32 bit Vista.