Dell M 90 & Quadro Fx3500 verdict..

Nick M Singer · Post by **Nick M Singer** » Fri, Aug 24 2007, 1:19PM

Finally got my Dell M90 and here are my impressions: I bought a unit with the full eCabs spec and the FX3500. The notebook is very well made and of very high quality with all the bells and whistles but then for the price it should be. The most important thing however is that in grapics performance it does not perform any better than other cards I have used, it is in fact worse than cards not recommended by the eCabs team. It is some 80% slower in rendering a presentation than my nVidia NX7900gt with 256M ram. So bottom line where graphics cards are concerned... save your money and just buy a reasonable or upper end gamers card it actually makes no difference!!!
PS, all those guys that promote Quadro, I did use the tweak utility and even turned off anti aliasing but there is no improvement!!

Rick Deskins · Post by **Rick Deskins** » Fri, Aug 24 2007, 1:59PM

I think the performance testing for the video cards was based on HOOPS performance, and not the LightWorks performance. All the 3D rendering in eCabinets is done via HOOPS api. The 2D Presentation rendering is done via LightWorks api.

Al Navas · Post by **Al Navas** » Fri, Aug 24 2007, 2:47PM

Nick M Singer wrote:...The most important thing however is that in graphics performance it does not perform any better than other cards I have used, it is in fact worse than cards not recommended by the eCabs team. It is some 80% slower in rendering a presentation than my nVidia NX7900gt with 256M ram. So bottom line where graphics cards are concerned... save your money and just buy a reasonable or upper end gamers card it actually makes no difference!!! ...

Glad to hear you finally got your new machine, Nick.

I have one question: Do you normally use an anti-virus, and if you do, which one?

Al

Nick M Singer · Post by **Nick M Singer** » Fri, Aug 24 2007, 10:53PM

Hi Al. I do use an Anti virus program and find Bitdefender quite stripped down and unobtrusive. I have had less hassle with it than Norton, McAfee or PC-cillin. Also reasonably priced.

Post by **Dean Fehribach** » Mon, Aug 27 2007, 8:29AM

This has been discussed before:

http://www.thermwood.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3902

As I stated then, \"...the only thing that helps with improving the rendering in 'Presentation' mode is Processor clock speed and system memory; the video card has very little to do with this area of the software.\"

I went on to say, \"The Quadro series improves performance in the editors, mostly.\"

Nick M Singer · Post by **Nick M Singer** » Tue, Aug 28 2007, 1:53AM

Perhaps so Dean, in the end the performance overall even in the editors is not significantly improved. As designers who spend a lot of time at the screen all we are concerned with really is how long things take and all we are measuring is user experience against cost and my conclusion is that the Quadro and similar are not worth the capital expenditure. I have test driven a clutch of graphics cards from Matrox to Ati and the improvements are negligable compared to a decent gamers card, if there is any. As an aside from this I updated the graphics driver for the Quadro to the most recent (08/07) because the installation default driver was dated 2006. I then ran the tweak utility which reported that my driver was out of date and would therefore not run. Anyone seen this problem before?

Kerry Fullington · Post by **Kerry Fullington** » Tue, Aug 28 2007, 6:21AM

NIck,
Where the top end graphics cards help is when you have a large graphics intense job. With the lesser cards it becomes almost impossible to move objects around or rotate the job, movements have time delays and jerky motions. The top end card makes movement of objects much faster and smoother.
The graphics card won't help for things like adding drawers and the time it takes to re-generate cabinets and other annoying things like this in the editors that take so long. (part of this problem is just us though. It is like going from dial up to DSL, at first the DSL seems lightening fast and as time goes on it seems to get slower and slower trying our patience. The better we get at navigating the editors, the slower they seem.)
One last thing the high end graphics cards do make for a much better image in Presentation View. The definition and colors are much better.
Kerry

George Davidson · Post by **George Davidson** » Tue, Aug 28 2007, 9:55AM

Here is a test
I would like to see how long it takes other people to down load
and then take the main bricks to the edit assembly room.
It took me a min.1 1/2 to open it
It took me 19 1/2 min's to take just the main bricks to the edit assembly room.
DeskTop (3 years old)
I have a memory 1-MB
Video memory-32 MB
Graphics card-NVDIA Ge Force 2 MX200
I was going to upgrad before but I think it is time now to

mikesand · Post by **mikesand** » Tue, Aug 28 2007, 10:51AM

My experience parallels Kerry's. Heavy computing (as in changing material thickness on a large job) is faster as the processor speeds up. Rendering can be done on most any decient graphics card. However if you put the images side by side differences show up in the way shadows, reflections and colour are presented. The big difference comes when working in a very large layout (10 to 15 meg files).

I have a PC that uses a high end gaming card and it will complete most tasks faster than my M90 with a quadro 1500 because it has a newer faster processor. Renderings come out pretty close though reflections and shadows are more realistic on the M90. However once the file gets real heavy (lots of doors and drawers) the PC starts bogging and lagging when the layout is rotated or panned. On my laptop it is a lot smoother. That is the difference between the quadro cards and a gaming card.

mike

Al Navas · Post by **Al Navas** » Tue, Aug 28 2007, 7:24PM

Rick Deskins wrote:I think the performance testing for the video cards was based on HOOPS performance, and not the LightWorks performance. All the 3D rendering in eCabinets is done via HOOPS api. The 2D Presentation rendering is done via LightWorks api.

Rick,

I think you know your stuff, based on your comments here. But, for us mere mortals, could you please explain what you stated in these three sentences? Trust me - I am not being a smart a$$, I really would like to know what it is you are saying here.

Thanks!

Al

Rick Palechuk · Post by **Rick Palechuk** » Tue, Aug 28 2007, 7:41PM

Hey Al, Hoops is an independent company that supplies 3D rendering components to design software companies.

http://developer.hoops3d.com/video/hoops3daf_demo.html

Michael Kowalchuk · Post by **Michael Kowalchuk** » Wed, Aug 29 2007, 9:05AM

George, from opening the file from the desktop to display it took 41.7 seconds. Here are my system's specs at the moment before I opened the file.

Dell Precision Workstation 390
2.00G RAM
Nvidia Quadro FX 550
128M VRAM
XP SP2
1 Application loaded in memory (Firefox)
43 Processes loaded in memory

It is true; Processor speed does make a difference. Also ensure you have nothing else but essential programs loaded in memory, and all the usual \"computer maintenance\" has been done (recent disk defrag, antivirus and other malware scans performed, current drivers loaded, dust cleared from inside chassis, etc.).

FYI:
API - \"An application programming interface (API) is a source code interface that a computer application, operating system or library provides to support requests for services to be made of it by a computer program.\"
http://www.computerworld.com/action/art ... leId=43487

Hoops 3D - \"...The HOOPS 3D Application Framework (HOOPS/3dAF) and the Parasolid Kernel Modeler... These tightly integrated API’s enable ....a team to quickly create advanced 3D solutions ...\"
http://www.techsoft3d.com/

LightWorks - \"An object-oriented API, with an incremental scene description mechanism...Hybrid use of scan-line and ray-trace algorithms and techniques such as analytical anti-aliasing and Interactive Image Regeneration (IIR) make LightWorks the fastest photorealistic-rendering engine available....\"
http://www.lightwork.com/

In other words, the best appropriate API's out there make eCabinet Systems a true state-of-the art software program.

If only the PC hardware manufacturers would catch up.

George Davidson · Post by **George Davidson** » Wed, Aug 29 2007, 10:37AM

Hi Michael first Thank You for all that I have to seat and read it 6 or 7
times to get that in my head.
I use ViaCad http://link.brightcove.com/services/pla ... d901546019
It is something like Hoops 3D.I do not want to buy a new desktop I would like to just upgard the one I have it is 2 1/2 years old I have good luck with it.It is a VPR Matrix 4100
http://www.vprmatrix.com/products_desktop_FT4100.asp
I upgarded to 1 MG last year

Michael Kowalchuk · Post by **Michael Kowalchuk** » Wed, Aug 29 2007, 11:00AM

George
Norwood, PA? I had family that lived in Chester - I used to love seeing all those 747's flying low overhead as a kid!

As for the clarification on Rick's post, I wanted to offer that to those that were curious as to some of what's \"under the hood\" of eCabinet Systems.

Al Navas · Post by **Al Navas** » Wed, Aug 29 2007, 4:37PM

Rick Palechuk wrote:Hey Al, Hoops is an independent company that supplies 3D rendering components to design software companies.

http://developer.hoops3d.com/video/hoops3daf_demo.html

Thanks, Rick! NOW some of the stuff makes some sense.

I think that I REALLY showed that my knowledge of some of this stuff needs some polishing. On the other hand, I have always been a user, and therefore I am not terribly familiar with the hardware and other such stuff.

Al

Thermwood / eCabinet Systems

Dell M 90 & Quadro Fx3500 verdict..

Dell M 90 & Quadro Fx3500 verdict..

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