NVIDIA GEFORCE FX5600 VS ATI RADEON 9800 PRO

[JAlvarado1802]

Has anyone tested either graphic card with Revit?
I am leaning towards the ATI Radeon 9800 PRo 128MB DDR RAM because it is Open GL 2.0 compliant.
I am planning to get either a workstation with an AMD Athlon 64 3200 with Radeon 9800 and 1GB RAM, or the AMD Athlon XP Barton 2800 with GeForce FX5600 with 1GB RAM workstation, but can't get info from AutoDesk Revit.

[Martin P]

Dont quote me on this, but graphics cards dont seem to make a great deal of difference to revit, Revit prefers processor power and ram...... I think? - sure a good card wont hurt though :wink: And I think just about Everyone eventually turns of the opengl - it seems to make you crash :cry: (maybe because we dont have compliant cards?)

[Vincent Valentijn]

Yeah.. what Martin says is right, graphic cards don't make a difference to Revit, it's RAM and processors here. I have openGL and eventhough you can switch that to -on- in Revit I only get a worse refresh than if I don't.

I would go for the Radeon anyway since.. it's a good price/quality card and it has openGL .. graphicscards might not do much right now but maybe in the future. And who knows we'll get VIZrender abilities or other stuff like that? and.. for your other 3Dsoftware [if you have any] it's a pro, right?
- by the way - If you can get your hands on the Radeon 9800 Pro [i]-ultimate- version I'd advise to get that one. For just a little more [30$ orso] you'll get a card which has quite an edge to the normal version.

[jbalding48677]

I will pipe in here. We have found that graphics cards do make a little difference AND we have had nothing but trouble with ATI cards, we are starndardizing on NVIDIA cards.

[Steve_Stafford]

I agree a good video card will make working with Revit on the whole much more pleasant...though it won't make a much difference on rendering speed, it will look a lot better on screen.

[Wes Macaulay]

I'm with JB on choosing nVidia video. ATI cards can be a problem with Revit and with AutoCAD too - ghosting errors and so on.

[JAlvarado1802]

I appreciate everyone's expert responses, but it does not answer the question, wether or not anyone had tested the cards.
So far Revit 5.1 has had problems with several NVidia and ATI cards, so no single line of cards or brand name is going to be the solution. Unfortunately, the people of AutoDesk are not going to give us the direct answer, because we are sort of beta-testing their software with various cards, and this can cost a company hundreds or thousands of dollars, and sadly for the amount of money we are paying for this software they should have the decency to test each card out there like video monitors do with video cards as their industry standard. Revit has about 10 so cards that have been tested by them. Some of their recommended video cards are no longer available on the market, so if you are shopping for a new PC you are out of luck if you wind up purchasing the PC with a video card incompatible with Revit 5.1. Some of the newer computers have hyper threading, and AMD is now introducing 64 bit processors, so even the components have to match the right frequency/hertz on memory, etc.

[gregcashen]

I think it is your responsibility to make sure that the hardware you buy meets your needs. For Revit to expend the time and energy to test every video card out there rather than focus on developing enhancements and new features would be foolish.

Give me Revit 6.0, I'll buy a video card, try it out and if it doesn't seem to work, I'll take it back and get something different (if you're real nice to people, they will sometimes let you do things like this!) Then I'll put it on the other 'puters.

Also, what if Revit tests a video card on a system with totaly different specs frm yours and everything works fine but on your machine it doesn't work so well? There is more to performance than just video cards.

That said, if Revit knows that a particular video card is problematic, they should publish this.

[papurajx]

My vote is for ATI Radeon 9000+ cards. I recommend this to my clients

[TheDon]

Well, until a benchmark like AugiBench or whatever comes out for Revit, it will be tough to tell. Anyone aware of AugiBench's cousing for Revit? Is it being worked on?

The Don

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"Don't quote me boy I aint said s***!"

[christopher.zoog51272]

Well, until a benchmark like AugiBench or whatever comes out for Revit, it will be tough to tell. Anyone aware of AugiBench's cousing for Revit? Is it being worked on?

The Don

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"Don't quote me boy I aint said s***!"

Myself and a few people at revit have been working out ideas for a revit benchmark system, look for it in the coming months.