Due to some problems I have been having with my machine, and very poor performance in Moi, I have been thinking about upgrading my video card. Would Moi see any improvement with a professional workstation card versus a gaming card? And if a workstation card is not worth the money, what would you guys recommend as far as the gaming cards go?

I would say marginal difference between a "Pro" card and a gamer card. MoI uses DirectX (Direct 3D) for display acceleration, Pro gpu's strength typically lies in the OpenGL drivers and are optimized as such. Gamer cards strength is in D3D since that is what games use. I would recomend the best gamer card you can (reasonably) afford. Both ATI (AMD) and nVidia are good and there are fans on both sides.

Hi andy - MoI doesn't really do anything that would benefit from one of those workstation cards - those primarily make a difference in OpenGL-based applications where they have better OpenGL drivers available for those brands of cards.

> And if a workstation card is not worth the money, what
> would you guys recommend as far as the gaming cards go?

Really anything recent (say from the past 3 years) from nVidia or ATI should be fine, really.

What card do you currently have, it is pretty old?

Are you working on a pretty large model? If so then you may need to adjust some of the display settings, the default settings make a pretty high density mesh which makes things look nice and smooth on the screen but takes up quite a bit of additional memory use and can bog the display down when you've got a complex model. If that's the case try adjusting the mesh settings to make a bit rougher looking display as described here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4196.2

- Michael

Also if your machine is kind of old, you may be running into problems with it overheating - try vacuuming it out if there is a bunch of dust in it.

Also make sure you've installed the latest video driver to see if that helps things.

- Michael

Well my machine is probably over 2 years old now, maybe even close to 3. The video card I currently have is an ATI HD4850 with 512mb. I thought it to be a pretty reasonable video card, but it has given me nothing but problems since day one.

I would take the suggestion to update the drivers, but the problem is it took me several weeks of tweaking the drivers when I first bought the machine to get the video card to work properly...... and I have been terrified to touch it ever since, for fear of messing it up. :) Which is another reason I am thinking it's about time to move on to a different card.

Does anyone else out there have a similar video card, and if so what is your performance like? I really want to use Moi for some projects, but every time I get something decently complex built it just becomes to slow to be useable.

That's a great tip on the display settings, I will try that and see how it goes.

As you can see in my signature I am running the HD 3870 w/512MB and it works quite well (no, not as well as a new one, but good non-the-less). If you have not updated drivers for a couple of years... I would suggest startig there. Catalyst has come a long way and there have been (undoubtedly) many bug fixes/enhancments in 2 years.

hi andy

i'm using an ATI 4870(Sapphire) with 512 GDDR5 and can't think of any "major" problems with my dual-screen-setup. Just loaded an assembly with 247 Objects(~55 MB) and it runs rather smooth. some tweaking might help you..

- deselected "add detail to inflections"
- set a higher Mesh angle(default would be 10..so 15 to 20 just works fine)
- deselect "Display hidden lines"



cheers,
marco

I have a computer than more 8 years old and Moi works like a charm on it! Graphic card the same!
The only problem is for big files as I have only one Giga hard memory!

Hi Andy,

> The video card I currently have is an ATI HD4850 with 512mb.

Hmm, I would have thought that card would have been fine...

That's kind of odd that it gave you problems right from the start, maybe there's some problem with your particular card, or some kind of issue with your computer's motherboard and that particular card or something like that.


> and I have been terrified to touch it ever since, for
> fear of messing it up. :)

You could make a complete low-level disk image backup using something like Acronis, that way you would be able to restore everything (including the OS, drivers, etc...) back to its current state. It's a good idea to do this from time to time anyway.

But yeah if you're afraid to upgrade the drivers, that does sound like a good reason to go for a new card anyway...

- Michael

Here is the model I was working on. It isn't that detailed but already was starting to bog down pretty bog.

I set the meshing angle to 15 and it works MUCH better, but I still feel like it shouldn't have been that bad even at the default 5.

andy:

What are the specs on your computer?

Hi Andy, actually the default is 10 degrees, which already produces quite dense display meshes, so having it set tighter than that at 5 degrees is not very good, that would make really heavy display meshes.

- Michael

Well maybe that was the problem, mine was set at 5.... I figured that was the default but apparently I had changed it at some point without realizing what I was doing. It looks like that may have been the source for the lack of speed.

On a side note what does the add detail to inflections do?

Hi Andy,

> On a side note what does the add detail to inflections do?

It analyzes surface fragments to see if they have a kind of "S" type shape where curvature is changing from one side to another (that's an inflection point), and breaks those down with more triangles.

Those kinds of areas tend to create some pretty noticeable display shading artifacts if they don't get refined enough. There was a recent example here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4276.1


In the future I'd like to try and manage the display density more automatically, something like start with a coarse mesh initially and then in the background calculate higher density ones if there is plenty of memory available.


- Michael

"In the future I'd like to try and manage the display density more automatically, something like start with a coarse mesh initially and then in the background calculate higher density ones if there is plenty of memory available."

- Michael

I like that idea! v3? ;-D j/k

> ATI HD4850 with 512mb

Yeah this video card is overkill for MoI :)

Yeah, but underwhelming for other modeling programs... ;-)
+1 for MoI