Topic: Is Quadro really needed?

[therock003]

I hear people keep saying it's better to use workstation cards for Drawing aplications, but it seems to me that these cards operate best on rendering/ 3d visualisation intensive apps. Like Solidworks/Catia/Inventor/Maya/3DS Max.

But are they really necessary fo Basic CAD environment like AutoCAD vanilla Bentley Microstation and possibly a couple of Verticals like Map 3d/Civil 3D/Raster Design and Architecture?

When laying out points and create figures and networks and surfaces, does the gpu come into play or the cpu mostly? I need to decide if i should go with a strong gaming card in sli configuration, or if i should bother with the quadro series, for the programs i mentioned.

[Dinosaur]

For most everyday work with Civil 3D one can get by with a very low performance video card.  Until you start playing with renderings in the viewer there is not that much work for a video card to do - even with multiple monitors running high resolution.  I can in fact run 2009 on my little Athlon 1800+ with its on board 32 mb S3 graphics adapter.  It was not a kick butt robust workstation but it would still do anything I needed Civil 3D to do.

[therock003]

Is there much need for renderings in civil 3d generally? Displaying surfaces, and corridors is this considered somewhat of a rendering?

And more importantly, since i will be loading lot of maps for use with map 3d and raster design. Will a graphics card help with loading attached tif with resolutions 11.000x7000 300-600dpi or is this a processor's job? Cause so far on my laptop it struggles when i even insert 1 or 2 and try to zoom-in, in such a picture.

[mjfarrell]

The better the Video Card you get the least likely C3D will Crash when you enter the Object Viewer....

The better the hardware you have the fewer Crashes C3D will throw up at you....

Every Crash is LOST profits, and productivity...