I am posting this here again because I think I will get more help here than in the video card section. I bought a quadro fx 3450 of ebay, used,, about $380, to work with 3Dsmax I am confused now. After buying it, I started researching and found out that they switched to D3D now (maxtreme 9) in max 8+maxtreme 8 OpenGL works slower than D3D.. I am frustrated,, In max9 I'm getting pretty good FPS but, Should I sell my quadro and get a geforce 6800 ultra and mod it or something?,, or maybe getting newer Directx based cards, gaming cards? I feel like I wasted my money. thanks a lot in advance.. I will really appreciate any advice. also,, will RivaTuner be be of any help to improve performance with my videocard?
Quadro FX 3450 is actually a "factory modded" NV41/42 based GeForce 6800 GS PCIe. If you are using Max 9 and only Max 9 in D3D/Maxtreme9 D3D mode, sell your Quadro on EBay and get a 8800 GTS 320Mb. If you use other 3D DCC and/or CAD packages, stick with Quadro, since OpenGL pro apps work much better on it.
That is why they look so similar ah? well , , I think that is a good idea, I'll probably get a directx based card,, since they are going in that direction,, (D3D) and sell the quadro. is there going to be a performance boost in my viewports in 3dsmax9? or I should not expect much difference? I use max 8 too but I did not see a performance boost with maxtream 8 (OpenGL based) in fact I noticed the viewports slower in general than with the regular D3D driver. Thanks a lot for your advise alec, that was very helpful.
