Hardware Guide for X3

[thorn]

Trying to decide on the amount of memory to put in upgrade. Where am I going to notice the difference (in and out of Chief) depending on the amount of memory used? (I am on a budget!)

[lbuttery]

depending on cost, I would go with 4 GB on Vista/win 7 and put the extra money into the cpu or video card or save it for a rainy day


if you will be doing lots of mutl-tasking and renders and other heavy duty apps then maybe 6MB or 8 MB

raytraces use cpu ram

you can always add ram later when needed

Lew

[BuildingDesign]

There's been lots of good talk on ram, ram speeds and monitor set up on this thread http://www.chieftalk.com/showthread.php?t=41153&page=15 as well just to try and help a bit! Seems to be two similar threads with different guys inputting at the same time LOL!!

[nikpapag]

Are FirePro 3D and Quadro cards recommended over regular cards or is memory size all that matters?

What kind of improvement would FirePro 3D and Quadro cards have over regular cards?

Will X3 or X4 utilize OpenGL 3.2 or stay with 2.1?

[lbuttery]

The recommendation currently is for a good gaming card for OpenGL 2.1

Quadro cards seem to offer no benefit per CA staff
maybe same for firepro if it's not a gaming card ???

I imagine that in time Chief will run/require OpenGL 3.x
the question is when ???

Contact CA staff for better details or wait for them to reply here

Lew

[Doug Park]

Are FirePro 3D and Quadro cards recommended over regular cards or is memory size all that matters?

What kind of improvement would FirePro 3D and Quadro cards have over regular cards?

Will X3 or X4 utilize OpenGL 3.2 or stay with 2.1?

In my experience the improvements that I've heard of are not worth the premium price that you would pay. There also seem to be driver issues with some of these cards that are difficult for us to get fixed. It is logical that cards that have the highest installed base will also have the most solid drivers.

Often the these expensive graphics cards lose any advantage they had over their current generation gaming cards when the next generation gaming card is released.

My recommendation from an economic stand point is to stick with the gaming cards. You can buy 3 or 4 of these for the price of one of the high end cards and probably be outperforming your high end card within a year of purchasing it.

Getting a card that supports OpenGL 3 is a good plan as eventually we will support it, but X3 won't be going past 2.1 for now. We are also still supporting lower end cards with reduced functionality for certain features.