Blender Underground

What do you recommend for a GFX capable video card?
- - - -that's whats needed for GLSL in blender BGE right?

Is that new -- - - or dead/ dying technology? All I'm finding is what look like out of date close out cards - with like a paltry 256 mg. memory

http://www.amazon.com/HEWLETT-PACKARD-N ... 161&sr=8-2

or

http://www.amazon.com/HEWLETT-PACKARD-F ... 161&sr=8-7


what's the story here?

????????

I believe Blender tends to play better with nvidia than ati. That nvidia card is a 'proffesional' card, you can read about CUDA tech here.

If your price range is $140.00, i would suggest this card. It supports a newer version of OpenGL, and thereby a newer version of GLSL, has 4x as much memory, with a memory interface 4x as wide.

*** DISCLAIMER ***
I do not work for either newegg.com or anandtech.com, i think they are good resources.

I believe Blender tends to play better with nvidia than ati. That nvidia card is a 'proffesional' card, you can read about CUDA tech here.


......yeah, I'm familiar with the Cuda: the Octane renderer, Iray, etc. Plus
the fact Nvidia is preferred for Cuda.



If your price range is $140.00, i would suggest this card.


....I had no range in mind. I just googled GFX and those are the only two
I found. - that actually say " GFX " in the specs. { I also called a computer store, and they didn't know what I was talking about}


It supports a newer version of OpenGL, and thereby a newer version of GLSL, has 4x as much memory, with a memory interface 4x as wide.


.....Looks like a great card. But I still dont see where you are determining its
GFX capable. Have they dropped that designation, but you are seeing a different
designation?

thanks!



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*** DISCLAIMER ***
I do not work for either newegg.com or anandtech.com, i think they are good resources.

GLSL is a very basic term, you probably won't find this term in any GCard spec.
I strongly believe any gaming card you'll buy will actually support GLSL.
...now as to know if it's gonna support all the new stuff from crysis 2, that's something else.

...but for blender, you'll probably be Okay.

I think GFX is a marketing term.

Well --unfortunately -- the GLSL in blender does NOT work

with my laptop nvidia card - - -- nvidia geforce GTS 250M ----- which appears to be a gaming card. All I get when I press "P" , in GLSL mode, is a white screen that hangs.

The card does have Cuda cores however, available for Cuda render.

- - - - So I'm still confused what EXACTLY Blender requires!


LINK TO CARD

http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_ge ... 0m_us.html


{using blender 256a }

thanks.

Confusing indeed.

Blender has some issues IMO with most Windows builds in general. My brother runs it in Linux and seems to have better luck with the graphics and he runs a "paltry 256 MB" nvidia card. Where I am running 2.49 in XP on a 4 GB machine with GeForce 8400 GS 512MB. I had to do some digging for a compatible opengl32.dll and toss it in the Blender folder. Without this DLL the Blender sucked ass on editing any file of size. The splash screen and drop down menus would scroll open slowly and then every time I moused over the button icons it would blink the splash screen.

Recently I tried 2.5x and I was impressed it didn't do as my 2.49 had done in the past. Then after some time it started getting funky with the graphics. As it stands I couldn't open the user prefs as a window (text was garbled) but the feature worked in a pane. So I will wait on the stable versions.

OS seems to be a factor, much more than the power of your card. I remember over a year ago, my brother even got it up and running on a Linux laptop with pathetic on board graphics memory. It functions poorest under Windows. This is not a slam against OS or Blender builds. It took a great bit of work to get my 2.49 up to snuff and I plan to stick with it for a very long time now.

Thanks Jabhacksoul,

this is an eye opener, albeit an unpleasant one.
I am on windows 7 - 64, the first windows, I can actually recommend.
{ don't get me started on the others}

And it's not too encouraging, for new users like myself --- on 2.5x -- to hear an experienced Blender user is going to stick with 2.49 " for a very long time".

This should be the # 1 goal of blender, to work flawlessly on win 7 -64 . That is the primarily current pro OS of choice for maya, max, modo, etc. Blender
should be no different.

I have never used Linux - and don't plan to start. But, for windows - there simply is no point to go back to XP / xp SP2 - an entirely way out of date
OS, that a majority of new programs will not run on correctly.

I would really like to get the definitive answer on a BGE VIDEO card - - - for
win 7 -64 -- , before I go rushing out and buy a new system. { or -- worse -- laptop, where you are LOCKED into it }



thanks

ps This all sounds like such a turkey shoot, I'm wondering if some ATI video cards
may work better!?

Xp isn't that bad.

I tried windows 7, didn't saw much improvement.
I went back to XP when windows 7 started to behave slower than XP.

well Im not putting anyone down if all they can afford is windows xp.

Actually windows xp/ sp2 was the first windows that was good. However, i cant
recommend it now, as I stated, it is what - 6 years out of date?

Modern graphic programs need direct x 10/ 11 , Net framework 4, etc etc.
Fill in the blanks. I have heard in fact, NONE of the newer 3dsmax's will run on it.

If you can afford it - dump windows xp, and get yourself win 7 - 64 with up to
16 gb ram.

And if its slowing down - the bane of windows - get yourself a tuneup app . This will cure it weekly! { fact xp has to be cured weekly as well }

I just wanted to address this part here. There are several reasons an experienced Blender user would say this.

1) 2.49 is the official stable release, 2.5 is still in beta and constantly changing.

2) The interface between the 2 is completely different, some people may not want to learn the new interface after having used 2.49 for any extended period of time. You would actually have to re-learn how to do some things.

3) Some people just don't like change. Period.

There are probably many more reasons, but those are the ones that come to mind right away. One or more of those could be behind someone's recommendation to stay with 2.49 or none of those. It doesn't mean that 2.5 is not worth using. Personally, I used 2.49 for about a week before installing 2.5. Now, I have 3 different builds of 2.5 installed on my pc. I prefer 2.5. Others prefer 2.49.

Your argument is invalid.
I could have windows 7 for free (no hack, this is a particularity from my university, whatever microsoft does, we have free access, including OS). Yet, I don't use 3dsmax nor do I want to. Directx11 is cool, but I can live without it easily.

What I mean is, of course window 7 is better than xp in many ways,

wait, let me write it in bold just in case : Windows 7 is way better than XP, I guess.

yet, is there really a need to go through all the trouble of changing to this new version yet ? It depend, I'm an old school boy who like stable & performant stuff, XP is still the way to go for me, just as there is still peeps who will keep their ipad 1 instead of scrapping it already and buying an ipad 2 right away (even though ipad 2 is supposedly about 2-9 times faster than the first one, and approximately 3-4 times cool-er). Just as there is folks staying with blender 2.49b.


There is a time for change, and the time for me to change my OS will be whenever I can't play a game or an apps on my current one.
...or whenever the fate of the world depend on the OS I use lol.
...in which case I would maybe consider upgrading mine haha

Well it boils down to my brother's OS requires DLLs and other support programs for Blender to function. As a Linix Kubuntu user, I think Blender just seems to get along better. My advice to anyone experiencing problems with Blender is to at least try any Linux OS with Blender on their machine. In most cases it requires less than 8 GB of drive space to make your machine dual boot the OS. There are many people on this forum running Linux that can help.

From my experience, the Blender can work well with any hardware as long as the OS has the best drivers available. My brother's graphics drivers have some major bugs when it comes to handling OpenGL. This is due to the fact that the people who wrote those drivers were more concerned with Direct X and Windows compatibility.

Viva OpenGL.

PS : is blender on OpenGL or DirectX ?