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.

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.

---

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.

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

Good to know. In realtime rendering GPU plays a major role, that I know, but when it came to final rendering I thought CPU had somewhat or a role, but I was wrong. Either way, I tried a 7950 oc'd to 7970 specs and the rendering was great (speed wise, about 8 min and change for 1000 frame uncompressed render 1080p). So, either 7950 or 7970 will net you some great results. I did use 7850 a while ago and it was decent, it lagged a bit on bigger stuff, but was still a champ. So a nice cheaper alternatives are out there, and since RL hasn't updated their list for the 7xxx series or GTX 6xx, maybe it would be a good idea to get a project set up and have people with different cards test it and post the results???

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

you may want to double check me on that though....for all I know the real time playing in iclone vs the actual rendering of the video may be different functions, but I do know the video card is more important than the cpu when it comes to Iclone performance. - Ie you can watch it play fast in real time, but when it comes to rendering, it can get as slow as molasses sliding uphill in mid winter ...on ice!! lol :)

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I've run into some of the issues noted here since IC4.x ... for example, random application crash when clicking any of the Color Picker tools, 100% CPU spike, frame rate drop, etc.

As with others who have replied, keeping my workstation up-to-date with the latest security updates and application patches is always a risk; so as to avoid such "time vampires", I've been freezing the machine state when I'm working on a revenue-related project.

When I am ready to update, I take a day to review product Release Notes - most notably nVidia and Microsoft Updates descriptions as they tend to be the frequent stability offenders.  For example, the current nVidia Release Notes highlight a few of the problems noted here:

http://us.download.nvidia.com/Windows/Quadro_Certified/320.49/320.49-win8-win7-quadro-tesla-notebook-release-notes.pdf 

Cheers,

__________________________________________________________________
DELL Precision T7500 & Precision M6600
Dual Quad Core XEON 2.13 GHz, 12 GB RAM, 1 TB HDD's
nVidia Quadro 5000 (2.5GB RAM), Driver 320.49 (2013.07.03)
Windows 7 Ultimate (64bit)
Dual 22" LCD Monitors

iClone 5.5 Pro, 3DXchange 5.5 Pipeline, CrazyTalk & Animator Pro
Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suite 2014
Adobe Production Premium CS6

A couple of years ago if you recall I had a more basic nVidea and I literally melted its spindle so the fan crunched in its housing rendering in iClone.

Laughably when I took it back to the shop the sales assistant (Some kid) asked me as he prepared to argue replacing it, "What software did you use it for?"
!!!HUH!!!
When I told him he took the bits of card away to his superior commenting, "I'm not sure if you should have used it for that. I'll just go and speak to my manager!" :D

I felt like saying.
1. "Would you like me to show you what my Boot can be used for?" :w00t:
2. Does it make better Custard?
3. Would you like to buy it as a superior brain to the one youre evidently not using?

I did some more research on the firepro cards. I use my firepro 5900 for photoshop, premiere, after effects. 30-bit certainly helps with pro applications. Its kind of crazy how important certain things are to a professional composition. For instance, how many of you calibrate your monitors? Thats really the only way to get close to working with what you truly see. Another question to look into as well is how many peeps know just what percentage of RGB their monitors run? What percentage of NTSC? To most people with Iclone that may not matter, but if you are trying to put up something more professional out of Iclone (which can be done easily), then things like this do play a big role.

As far as firepro cards go, I looked into how they compare to gaming cards. Apparently the new Wxxx versions are doing quite well. W7000 is on par with 7870 for gaming, while w9000 is on par with 7970. This is actually pretty freaking awesome since Iclone certainly takes advantage of a gaming card vs. a workstation card. If you use pro programs such as Adobe, Autodesk etc... then this was actually a pleasant surprise. I think I may go, after all this bitching and moaning about differet cards, with w7000 and try it out. If it works good with IC, then we are in business.

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

w7000 works great in IC. It runs on par with gtx680 as far as my test scene goes. No CPU chugging either. I know its a pricy card, and if there are any pros out there using it, it may be worth it.

Anyone try the new gtx7xx series yet?

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