Do Maya 2010 and Lightwave 3D 10 use your GPU at all for rendering? Are there plugins to do that? Reason I'm asking is I need to set up a couple workstations and I want to know if I'm just using the GPU for displaying your scenes as you work or if it's going to contribute to your render times, in which case I'd spring for a workstation GPU. Thanks in advance.
So they will render faster? What kind of render speed improvement will I see? I'm only going to do rendering on these workstations so the animators can get a quick glimpse of what they're making, the rest is going to the renderfarm, so if there's a significant time saving there, then it might be worth getting a Quadro.
Most 3D modeling and rendering applications will use the card only to display the scene as you're working on it, and not for the final render. While GPU-accelerated rendering exists, and there are some render plugins for a number of applications, it's not really mainstream yet. IIRC neither Maya nor LW3D do gpu rendering out of the box--you'd need to use a different renderer. How useful that would be depends on just how accurate your rendering will/needs to be as a representation of the final product, as if you're shipping the final off to the render farm that uses the default renderer results will be different. Finally, depending on the implementation, you may or may not see a payoff even in the case of GPU renderers; the main difference between a Quadro and consumer cards is driver optimization for the OGL display used in the viewport. They may or may not perform better when used for CUDA/OpenCL/etc.
Okay, thanks for the info. I'll save $500 and just stick with the GTX 550 I was planning on sticking in there.
