Video card for GIS and CAD work....

Hi there. Graphics card noob on the loose.

I am doing GIS work (Arc GIS 9.x). A bit of 3D Analyst stuff with that. ie highly vector based.

Currently running GeForce 7600GS. Painfully slow!

Looked at Quadro FX 1800 and GeForce 9600GT. They both have similar texels/second stats. Quadro is 4 x the price of the Geforce.

Why do people recommend going for the Quadro, when the GeForce seems to have the same type of performance figures for 1/4 of the price?

Cheers, Ken

 

and what is a texel?

 

The only thing I see that the x1800 has over the 9600 is it has OpenGL 3.0 the 9800 has 2.1 and the x1800 has shader 4.0.

Newer technology/futureproofing.

X1800 can be hooked upto 3 monitors.

Otherwise the 9800 has more power.

What is the rest of your systems hardware including Power Supply? If you don't mind me asking

And a rough budget? and we can throw some suggestions your way

Edit: A Texel is the Texture version of what a Pixel is to a picture Lots of pixels to make pictures, lots of Texels to make Textures.

Edit Again lol: I forgot, the X1800 has more ram and from what I understand CAD etc requires more RAM than GPU power where as gaming is the other way round. The Quadro's are also officially recomended by AutoDesk.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/hc?siteID=123112&id=6711853&linkID=9240618

 

Quado cards are better for CAD work as they are designed for workstation stuff not gaming.

GeForce cards are designed for gaming

Quad cards do bad for gaming and very good for 3D stuff and CAD and vice versa.

If your able to afford it I'd go with the Quado card

 

Hi thanks for the input (much appreciated). I am running a C2D E6700 (2.66GHz), 4GB RAM, N7600GS 512MB, Windows XP MCE SP2 32-bit. Asus P5B Delux MB. I built the system about August 2006. Thinking about upgrading to Windows 7 64-bit, 64-bit may be a necessity if I put a video card in with more memory on it. Budget $500 - $1000 NZD which is about $350-$700 USD.

PSU is Thermaltake 430W, the standard one that I got with the Tt Matrix case. Adequate for what I have been running but I will most likely have to upgrade if I get a power hungry graphics card. Was thinking a nice Coolermaster 650W or something like that.

I was looking at Wikipedia earlier, which said many of these cheaper cards do OGL 3.x, however when I look at nvidia.com, I see wiki is incorrect in this.

I see what you mean about future proofing, for many of these cards it comes down to do I want OGL 3.x or not.

Anyway, I am a complete noob so suggestions, inputs, comments very welcome

 

The FX1800 doesn't seem like it's eats much power only 58 watts max and doesn't require a power connector

The psu you have now will probably be able to do it with a FX 1800

If you want to go a big higher end like a FX 3800 you probably will need to upgrade your PSU.

Depending on how much stuff you do you may want to get a quad core cpu.