as far as I know

the gpu plays a major role in rendering
the ram takes the stress in textures and models.
the cpu takes the stress with videos and physics.

not sure what takes the stress in particles.

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"To define Tao is to defile it" - Lao Tzu

I have a firepro 5900 sitting around. I tried it today. Worked great with premier and is just awesome when it comes to intense work in photoshop. However, running IClone was painful. Half the framerate of the 7970. I would suggest, if money permits, to look into 7950 or 7970. They have been good performers. One thing where I noticed an improvement with the GTX 680 was in the rendering speed. GTX 680 would usually help with rendering a 1000 image scene in about 8 minutes while 7950 would do it in 9 and change. As far as 7970 goes, the speed is on par with 680. The price... a bit cheaper than 680. 680 had 4GB vs. 7970 at 3GB's of ram.

Also, I was under the impression that CPU did the rendering of Iclone. I am really not sure what the procedure is anymore, but I actually timed the renders and graphics cards had something to do with it. What do you guys think?

Alienware 15, i7 4710hq, GTX 970m, 16gb ram, 4k display, 1.5TB SSD raid.

My first card in my first serious PC (a Dell Workstation from 1999) was a FireGL, which worked well with Max (v 2.5 then). ATI bought/acquired the company that made that card, so it was a different line altogether from their consumer cards. Maybe I should get a FirePro if it actually works well with iClone.

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I am not partial, any longer, to either AMD or Nvidia. I just want everything to work :).

I liked AMD the whole time, but Nvidia just had much more stable drivers like a year or so ago.

Now that I think of it, I used FirePro V8800 for a while when I was working with Max exclusively. I ran Iclone with it and it was super stable. Hmmm.... Now, those cards were nice, but only if they were optimized for your application. Oh how I wish Mach Studio Pro actually worked out. It used the FirePro card exclusively to render some great looking scenes in real time, that was some nice GPU rendering.

Either way, if your Nvidia is stable then by all means keep it. Mine was having a heck of a time. As far as PhysX goes I am not a gamer at all and as far as I know that was used in games quite a bit. Not sure how much of it is used in 3d animation... Maybe someone will enlighten me.

I am just happy that this is a driver issue and I could correct it. I can certainly see people having some serious troubleshooting problems once this starts happening. That I am not a fan of... and ATI used to make some bad drivers that created whole heaps of trouble too... A bit more stable now however.

Alienware 15, i7 4710hq, GTX 970m, 16gb ram, 4k display, 1.5TB SSD raid.

I was doing more research today on video cards, one drawback I learned was that the AMD video cards don't use physX - and they use a software that diverts these instructions to the cpu - which i imagine is a hindrance on older generation cpu's but most likely an advantage in modern cpu's as they are faster / more powerful and can help split the load. I'm still sticking with Nvidia though- simply because they get more support from various softwares I use than AMD. I predict that eventually AMD will have most of the enthusiast / gamer share of the market in the future - especially if intel welds their future bradwell chips to their motherboards.
AMD parts have been getting much pricier lately too.

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I went to Nvidia because I remember the stability. I had issues with the gigabyte 7950, which now I am thinking had problems with the way it was sitting on the motherboard. For the longest time it ran great then it started showing artifacts and flickering. I decided to switch to GTX 680 and had issues.

From the research it sounds like a lot of people have had issues with the Nvidia drivers. Some programs were using a ton of CPU after updating the driver but a lot less when downgrading. It sounds like from update 260 and up stuff went wrong. It wasnt every program, it was certain programs, but still an issue with the drivers.
I tried every single one of the drivers from 310.90 to whichever is the latest one. They all kept doing the same thing. Quite a few people are pissed that its been going on for so long and Nvidia didn't seem to address it. I can understand that they are not fixing the issue because it just happens with some programs...

I do agree that Iclone has compatibility issues with Nvidia drivers. However, Iclone worked fine with GTX 560 and 550ti but this was before the update issues. Plus Nvidia 550 and, I believe, 560 are recommended for Iclone... I wonder how they run it with the new drivers??

Either way, it is looking more and more like AMD is getting their crap together. This makes me happy. AMD/ATI cards were always a bit cheaper, but they weren't always the most stable. This is not the case as much now.

Alienware 15, i7 4710hq, GTX 970m, 16gb ram, 4k display, 1.5TB SSD raid.

nvidia beta driver build 326.16 - running stable for me so far.

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This is painful. I've used nVidia for years because ATI (now AMD) never seemed to get their drivers right. What is weird is that I have had my GTX 580 (and my current PC build) for over two years and never experienced problems like this before.

I still believe there is a nVidia-iClone mismatch because other applications seem to work OK. I don't game so I wouldn't know how the performance is in that area.

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It was NVIDIA after all.

Installed 7970, loaded the drivers, open Iclone... CPU usage at 13%. Resize to my hearts content cpu usage did not get higher than 20%. Scenes I had trouble with... WORK F'N great.

There ya go. If you have nvidia... you have something to think about. Its ridiculous.

Alienware 15, i7 4710hq, GTX 970m, 16gb ram, 4k display, 1.5TB SSD raid.

My experience is only slowdown. So I use smaller players to view my output else the video is about ten paces progressively per second per second behind the audio.  Forget about looking at the scroll bar, that's just doing its own thing.

I use top end nVidea and I don't know if it's an IClone 5x issue or an nVidea issue but I detest the anti-alias anti that's going on.

Slow I can handle. Noisy little CPU and GPU fans playing spaceship take-off I don't mind either.... What I cannot stand currently and is a big disappointment are the missing anti-alias results. Diagonal lines whistling across straight edges like a fan closing...... what the hell is that all about?

With the latest nVidea update, yes,  video players and video playback in whatever format where ever, embedded layered or mapped ....... seems to "Walk like an Elephant!"

I bet Laurel and Hardy never suffered all this. :)

Armstrong.